From a window, afternoon light filters through shifting, still-clinging autumn leaves onto a laundry room wall. Dazzling, real-time projection. Viewed but unrecorded by anything other than my memory. Home movies.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday | Tagged autumn colour, memory | Leave a Comment »
Can you see through my eyes?
Fall leaves gold into green
Sun after clouds
Limitless blur of blue sky
Seasons slipping by me
A raucous jay, dimming light
Backlit gold into red
Rise and fall in the breathing wind
Years getting by me
I have seen too much
Nightfall
How I wish you were here
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday | Tagged autumn, autumn colour, on grief, twilight | Leave a Comment »
Checking the tomato patch this morning, the darkened Monarch chrysalis was unchanged.
By noon, the same report.
By late afternoon, only an empty husk of a once bejeweled green chrysalis remained.
In the garden, astride a Verbena bonariensis, was a brilliant Monarch butterfly slowly fanning its wings.
By early evening, it was gone.
Posted in Nature, The Garden | Tagged monarch butterflies, monarch caterpillars, monarch migration | Leave a Comment »
Nights are cool, leaves are changing, autumn arrives this evening.
After a hard spring, it was a good summer. With a focus on soil health, the garden thrilled as never before.
Flowers blossomed, vegetables and children grew. As a Monarch butterfly Waystation, our garden enjoyed the summer-long company of Monarchs and a bumper crop of their caterpillars.
Still gathering tomatoes, I unloaded another basket in my kitchen just now. To my surprise, I found a darkening Monarch chrysalis attached to the side of a fully ripe tomato. I carefully replaced the tomato in the garden. Along the siding of the house, I spotted another chrysalis. With luck, both butterflies will emerge soon to begin their southward migration.
Years ago, a late-blooming Monarch butterfly named Longshot was unable to take to the skies by the time it emerged. Here is hoping these two make it.
Flowers, butterflies and humans – they all have a better chance of emergence when the conditions are right.
I will keep you posted.
Posted in Nature, The Garden | Tagged monarch butterflies, monarch caterpillars, monarch migration | Leave a Comment »
8:03 AM, the big orange school bus rumbles by. Just tall enough to see out our living room window, my oldest talks about when he will ride that bus to school. My youngest is an infant.
8:03 AM, the big orange bus stops routinely now, picking up both my children for school. While we wait, we play basketball, ride scooters or throw baseballs, sometimes snowballs in the winter.
A decade later, the big orange school bus trundles by. The bus driver who piloted bus #1 for years, who knew and protected my children, retired last year. My children still ride a bus, it stops earlier, for older students. The new driver on this route has no memory of the stop in my driveway, or of those who rode into the world from here. My oldest now stands taller than me.
Working at home does not make me wealthy, but in every minute I spent helping my children on the bus and off, I became quite rich. I am grateful. Each school day morning, the rumble of the big orange school bus reminds me. 8:03.
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Summer’s end signals the presence of ripe tomatoes in my overgrown garden. Different types, heirlooms grown from seed, vines slide slowly to the ground under the weight.
Fall feeling day, hummingbirds pay me no mind as I move my garden hod through the vines, picking up large tomatoes, many blemished, fine by me.
Blanched, peeled and processed, there is a fine tomato soup in the future, especially when I push past some friendly weeds to find the basil planted earlier this summer.
Early evening, sun in the west window, kitchen is aglow. Cleaning up, a solid field of tomato seeds and membrane covers the bottom of my white porcelain sink. Bright red, and red orange, floating with dun seeds, a moment of extraordinary color that took a summer to grow. So common, so rare.
Hard to know what we are here for, if not to notice moments such as these.
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The commonality of sudden death leaves me wondering about those who wake, days or months after the passing of a loved one, to a stark landscape – rearranged but never restored.
I have little standing to mourn the Keeper. Never married nor lovers, not related in any way except by the stunning and lucky recognition of a common mind decades ago. Good friends are forever – except when they are not.
In a life where death is assured, grief has an odd role. It is to be dealt with, gotten through or over, and its light grey coloring of the world overcome. There are many commentators more artful than me who can describe the textures of its peculiar, forced friendship.
Grief delivers liminal space. A place where life washes over itself like water tumbling around stones in the finest mountain stream of your memory. Ever the same as you watch, but lost when attention shifts. Is anyone ever really gone? Hard to keep up with the coming, and the going.
One thing is certain. The Keeper, along with most loved ones, would likely prefer to be fondly remembered, rather than mourned.
I am just not there yet.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday | Tagged death, friends, grief | Leave a Comment »
On a farm yesterday morning. Walking acres of orderly vegetable rows with the rising sun. Rooster sounds in the distance.
Taking photographs for marketing purposes in exchange for gorgeous, chemical-free produce. A sweet deal and a good trade, at least for me.
Corn, cabbage, beans, abundance. Hard work, sweat, blighted tomatoes, it is all here. A gift.
Focus ahead. Rows of seedlings give way to lanes of mature onions and cauliflower. Row upon row of varied texture, size and color, convergence out of frame.
I get the shots.
Looking back, I am startled at the view just passed. Similar order, but striking difference in look and feel.
Try it sometime.
Oncoming views are new only once, but the mutable nature of the past remains constant.
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