THROUGH THE WINDOW: Haiku

In the First Frosty Dawn I Lie

Birdsong prevails, but.....
separate (by pane and sash)
- the windows! - all shut.

Good Morning, New Neighbor!

Lived here since 1993. First time I've seen a fox sitting in my backyard...

...guess it's not very interesting here.

FIELD NOTES: Give me a break....

WHAAATTT???? 
 

....snow day number seven???

FIELD NOTES: Through the Window

Listening to the wind...

...On an average Sunday morning, I might put light jazz on Pandora. Today, some might describe the wind as howling, but it is not howling. It is continuously crashing over the house like an ocean of wind, surging up the snow - bone dry from the extreme cold - like a sand storm and reminding the window frames of where their cracks are. So I need to be quiet….and write. The sun is in its usual place, but odd white clouds and snow dust wrap around it like a mummy’s cloth. It is blindfolded, beaming without the benefit of sight, using the branches on the towering locust trees like long bony fingers groping for something to hold on to. A few birds make a run at the feeder, perching on the railing, taking off like skilled fighter jets when the time is right. How are they out there? If it were me, just wearing feathers, I would die! But out there they are…and with plenty of company. The snow cover is not pristine; it is crisscrossed with a collection of tracks like Grand Central Station. There is a raccoon living on a shelf in the shed. A woodpecker flew out of a hole in the side of the house. I sometimes hear scratching in the attic from mice. I am a reluctant Dr. Doolittle. The violence of nature often draws me in, like a voyeur, but only when I know I am safe. I like to press my palm against a cold window and feel how thin it is. Right now….I see my whitened landscape as the direct opposite of desert on the other side of the world. Could I just flip it like an hourglass? I suddenly feel as dry as the desert – the furnace keeps running after escaped heat, the indoor air is static, my plants are brittle, my throat is dry, my skin is dry, my muscles cramp because in the absence of heat, we have all forgotten to drink! I listen to the wind unceremoniously taking down the things I once meticulously set up and I can’t do anything about it. I am physically apart from much of what I want, but I have sensed that the universe in general is through testing my patience and is stirring, preparing to reintegrate into something extraordinary.

FIELD NOTES: Behind the scenes is where I am most content…

Through the window

…I went to visit mom…she was lonely…we had tea and read the newspapers…I did the crossword puzzle my father used to do…I drove home…alone,not lonely…transported elsewhere by public radio’s Echoes…cutting through the hills on 254 to Litchfield, imagining the horizon line like former tribes of Connecticut…the day was a confusion of weather…cloud-cover one minute, a peek of sun the next…wind…calm…drizzle…I felt taken back behind the scenes to nature’s weather board…cue: cloud blanket above horizon…now spotlight trees in hills, cue: sunlight…wait…cue: raindrops…just a few…no, cue ominous dusk…ah yes, I am home…behind the scenes.

FIELD NOTES: I hear one bird…

Through the (weekday) window

...its song muffled through the closed up winter window sashes. The heat clicks through the hot water baseboards in my bathroom, the morning news speaks so thinly from its cave in the other room that I can barely hear what’s new in the world today…but this one bird is what alerts me that I have been in a stupor of sorts, buried in snow and government paperwork. But that is the character of February. It is a good month for Lent. It is the month in which I write the least…move the least…eat the most and sleep the most. The attic overhead feels pregnant and overdue. The household file box needs its yearly purging. I take stock in my inventory, both in what I have collected and in what has somehow slid in around me like a storage facility. In February, its closeness turns claustrophobic and fills my nostrils like so much dust. I mull over things, incubate ideas about what’s next, brood and hibernate and absorb and fidget. What relief the one bird is, nature’s town crier, chirping that what is not here now, is preparing to return. Bulbs are energizing underground; they simply cannot be flowers all year round. So, back to the drawing board...

FIELD NOTES: It’s the morning after Halloween, yet I hear…

Through the window

…the clatter of little bicycle wheels in the circle…and sweetened giggles. Last night, even though it was oddly seventy degrees, the trick-or-treaters came early to beat the pouring rain and swelling wind. The lights went out prematurely. The weather forecast for the coming week classically mirrors my daughter’s in Seattle: partly cloudy, fifty…and then more rain for the weekend, so…it’s official: the leaves will prevail and overwinter on my lawn. So be it. Some gentle folks are beginning to mourn the season’s passing but, by my (Polish) nature, I gravitate toward the bittersweet, towards its mysteries and challenges. Even when I set out to be gloomy - because like Eeyore it is pleasantly self-indulgent to be so - inevitable sleep, or…a mug of coffee, or…a cup of tea, or…antics out the window, or…something…rallies me…which can be annoying if you’ve just gotten yourself into a good funk…and there is plenty to be funky about! As I write, a new wind - like a sharp-nailed witch’s hand - has just yanked the jack-o-lantern flag hanging out by the front door…and then…disappeared, as if to snidely remind me that it is not all honey in The Hundred Acre Wood, there are Heffalumps…and Woozles…and it is time to walk the plank…to bravely find deeply hidden beauty…

“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus, 1913-1960, French novelist, author and philosopher, 1957 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature

Optimism and Pessimism Quotes and Quotations

FIELD NOTES: It was as if I saw my backyard for the first time…

Through the window
Monday, September 14, 2009

…newborn… primal…existing in its own place and time…rather than mine. A mist of fog at dawn softened all its blemishes…its rough spots at areas of neglect or natural consequences were out of focus. It was the opening day of my preschool class and it was a gentle…and very lovely…reminder to fine tune what I see, to put on a shelf my frustration with actions of true innocence that may come by the way of the wild things or the young charges in my life at present. Years ago, I had to drive late at night to pick up teenagers in a very thick fog and recall the nerve-wracking lack of visibility, but this day, there were no nerves, there was just a blanket tucked in around me, the birds chirping like a wind-up crib mobile and remembered feelings of safety and comfort and the hedge of childhood that guarded me against the hard edges that would come…

FIELD NOTES: Ticket not required...

Through the window

...but the birdsong is so amazing this morning, it seems like it ought to be. The eighties are much too hot for April in New England - early morning and all the windows open from the night before. A lumbering breeze tries to stir the indoor air as I try to smooth out the night from my face and hair in the bathroom mirror – not an easy task as I’ve just recovered from my first stomach ‘bug’ in about ten years. But the cardinal is as brilliant as a soprano at the Met and the other small birds in chorus add their melodious backup with verve, as well as the raucous crows that try out like high school ne’er-do-wells who think Chorus will be less boring than Study Hall. Birdsong trampolines my soul…rebounding whatever is weighing it down to airy heights…over and over and over. Good thing no one is listening as they’d be bored with how many times I utter words like…beautiful… gorgeous…amazing…alright already! This will be the most comfortable portion of the day…early morning is my favorite and I wish it would last all day, but then of course it wouldn’t be morning. But imagine having to have a ticket issued in order to hear morning birds or bells or chimes, to smell flowers or rain shower or fresh wash on the line, or view an amazing spider web or bird’s nest. Maybe it would cultivate a culture of new values; values for things not currently taxed, calculated, counted, packaged, adulterated, tested or hyped. As for me, I thank my feathered friends…well, maybe just not the woodpecker jack hammering my cedar shakes!

My Life in Birds (a winter story) short PDF

FIELD NOTES: I have never seen mountains....

NYT Art Review: Mythic West of Dreams and Nightmares

Through the window

...I realized as the plane descended into Salt Lake City and I experienced for the first time in my fifty years the American landscape west of Chicago. Only the robotic female voice of the GPS kept my rental car where it should be …headed to Ogden…as I glided past white peaks as if I were in some IMAX theater. There are no words…and no photographs…that can adequately translate this experience…because it is about ‘having to be there’ to the ultimate degree. And I got to ‘be there’ because I was flown from CT to UT for the weekend as a birthday present for my daughter's 21st birthday to see her dance professionally…a surprise gift for both of us from her director. I am not ordinarily a spur of the moment person, so this was a challenge…a ‘monumental’ one for me…and in retrospect, it is as close as I have ever come to ‘running away’. She performed an emotionally (and physically) exhausting interpretation of the human artistic expression lost in the Holocaust and, after the all too brief live contact with my daughter, along with little sleep or food, I was already flying back out of Utah early the next morning with heightened senses and a golden opportunity to observe the changing landscape across the country in a way I had never imagined. Progressing back towards the middle of the country the land smoothed out, the roads appeared like a grid on a tablecloth and the buildings of Minneapolis became the highest peaks. On the approach into Connecticut, I saw the contrast. My daughter was right…we don’t have mountains here. Incredibly bumpy, pock-marked with little lakes and the roads coiling around and up and over the wooded hills like piles of giant garden hoses…I wondered why anyone would choose to settle this landscape. I had brought along a book I had started reading (Three Cups of Tea) which turned out to be a strange kind of coincidence…or not. The setting of the book is in the Himalayas where the mountains are more than twice the elevation as the ones I saw in Utah...so...I still have never seen mountains…but I now can feel, and appreciate, their presence daily…

Excerpt from Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin:

“Nearly a century earlier, Filippo De Filippi, doctor for and chronicler of the duke of Abruzzi’s expedition to the Karakoram, recorded the desolation he felt among these mountains. Despite the fact that he was in the company of two dozen Europeans and 260 local porters, that they carried folding chairs and silver tea services and had European newspapers delivered to them regularly by a fleet of runners, he felt crushed into insignificance by the character of this landscape. ‘Profound silence would brood over the valley,’ he wrote, ‘even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by Nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her.’”

FIELD NOTES: Hey, that can in the woods looks familiar!

Through the kitchen window

...it’s the one that I keep on the deck, handle locked and bungee corded! It’s still lightweight because I haven’t filled it up yet with a fresh forty pounds of black oil sunflower seeds…and someone just couldn’t wait. The wild ones have carted it off and made fun with the lid like kids in a cookie jar. The first snowstorm is predicted today – a BIG one – possibly followed by another, so I should haul the can back, clean off the dirt clods, load the feeder and hang the suet cage as soon as I can. When the snow does come, I will be entertained by the chickadee and cardinal, nuthatch and tufted titmouse, junco and wren, sparrow and yes…even the blue jay…and woodpecker…and squirrel. There is no point in being angry with instincts and clever survival skills…after all, if you open up a “soup kitchen”, they will come. I verbally fuss about the deck being a mess with excrement and shells...but I think what I am more annoyed about, is that I failed to wake up to the racket and gypped myself out of watching their antics…

FIELD NOTES: There is a regatta and sprint...

Sunday morning through the car window

...that I happen upon this Sunday morning. A small sign at the end of the road tells me so. The weather is as crisp as a fresh Macoun. Spectators are walking along the road from the designated parking areas to the site of the local rowing center on the riverbank of the Housatonic. There are men and women comfortably dressed in shorts and windbreakers wearing expressions of delighted anticipation and I am oddly envious, wishing I could join them even though I am not acquainted with any rowers in the meet. On my drive here, I notice many joggers and cyclists earnestly progressing along the roadside. Leisure, discretionary and purposeful leisure, is all around me. There was a time when I sped along this road each Sunday morning with neatly-dressed children seat-belted in, hurrying to church, hurrying to set up my Sunday school classroom, often questioning the joggers and cyclists and boaters for putting their bodies before their souls even though I already had a pile of weekly sale flyers from the morning paper stacked on the seat next to me with thoughts of the afternoon schedule diluting the intent of where I was going before I even got there. But today I am driving my oldest son to the hospital to complete his month-long course of daily IV antibiotics and, like the cinematic orphan wistfully gazing into an inviting café window, I am resigned, my consciousness harboring the thought that leisure...(and money)...(and worship)...are most enjoyable when they are discretionary and purposeful. In the direction of my peripheral vision I say out loud, “I want to be a part of that; I must have more of that in my life…” There is life inside the car and I am suddenly aware that I am driving right through the point of it.

FIELD NOTES: A hum briefly hung outside my writing window;

Labor Day, the first seconds of September, 2008
...I thought it was a bee or my garden pinwheels oddly spinning without breeze. It lasted only seconds…brrrrt…but luckily sound pulled eyes from computer screen to window screen in the very instant a hummingbird hovered at the window box. Both the bird and I were delighted and deliriously hopeful for a split-second until, as it so often happens, fascination turns to disappointment. We both returned to our quests, astutely aware of our powerful senses, but now, all the more possessive of them because the bright red geraniums in the window box were fake.

FIELD NOTES: The pineapple sage is closed down like an umbrella...

“Sick” Day, through the window

...due to my unintentional neglect. I called in sick to work because I feel similarly. I rinse the breakfast dishes in the sink and wonder, what now, has blown into the backyard. Sometimes it feels as if I am deliberately placed downwind from the debris of others. But not today, it is not a bright pink candy wrapper, but a lone impatiens blooming in the middle of the lawn! Last summer the deer availed themselves of my hanging baskets as if they were salad bowls and now perhaps they have brought back one of the flowers (albeit with less than delicate means) as a peace offering. I am reminded of my father's wit in the story he liked to curb my wishing moods with, the one about the little girl who wanted a pony and all she got was manure, but her optimism was so great that she declared "Oh goody, goody! I almost got a horse!" How lucky I am today to have gotten a flower. Thanks, Dad.

FIELD NOTES: There are dolls on the side of the road...

Through the window, 84 West to New York City

...little plastic arms and legs, some with pieces of dolly clothing. The happy yellow-pink-teal of playthings streaming past my driver’s side window refresh my anxiety. I wonder if traveling before me there is a sad small face or a large angry one on the road ahead. How do significant belongings ever get to the side of the road: accident, carelessness, over-indulgence, domestic violence, anger, reaction, revenge, crime, punishment? I am a country-road girl and it does not seem real, this driving to the City to see my 23-year-old son in the ICU after emergency open-heart surgery. The strange image of dollies on the side of the road comes along like a random poke in the stomach and I can't explain why I feel sympathy for the child who lost a suitcase of toys except for the idea that perhaps my own child's anxiety has a great deal of company in the universe...both big and small.

FIELD NOTES: Death came with humor...

Through the (car) window

...when I drove out of the neighborhood this morning. Transporting my oldest son to yet another doctor’s appointment, the inside of our car was filled with an air of concern, yet a hint of resolution with the sun shining and the radio tuned to NPR for edification. We were interrupted by a coffee klatch of mourning doves congregating on the road. As the flock reluctantly dispersed in slow motion, one bird still sat in the middle of the pavement as if he assumed that no one would have the audacity to run him over. I assumed that no creature capable of flying would procrastinate himself to death. Continuing to talk while automatically glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw feathers pouf up into the air like a pillow bursting open...and a laugh came out like a cannon ball...its black humor surprising me.

FIELD NOTES: It is the night after the Full Cold Moon...

Christmas Eve 2007, through the window

...and as we travel under its ‘special effects’, we remark over and over how unreal this moon looks, unreal because it looks like something in the movies and we all know in the digital age we can no longer rely on what our eyes can see. My subconscious eye conjures an image of a great beach ball floating far on the horizon of an endless ocean with a figure on the shore; the figure in contentment faces the beach unaware that it will not be able to retrieve the ball at its convenience, not because it hasn’t the wherewithal, but simply because it isn’t paying attention. It has forgotten that the ball is in motion and miscalculated how far it must travel to meet it. One day a year, we strive, crave, hope for perfection in the special effects we call Christmas – we get only one take – but here before us in our man-made capsule, nature has trumped our feeble attempts, neither LED, incandescent or fluorescent can duplicate the illumination above us. A contrail shoots out to the right of the giant, glowing moon and I squeal with excitement that it must be Santa! It MUST be! I have chosen to forget that the children accompanying me are 17, 19 and 22…and so have they. I say the word ‘moon’ like I’m saying it for the first time…”Look at the Mooooon!”….like I have just unwrapped a surprise gift. Tonight, the moonlight is a surprise and a gift to all the earth and even though it is so very far away, I do believe in what I think I see.

FIELD NOTES: The smell of green has changed...

Through the window (Autumnal Equinox)

...maturing from newborn celery to supple chlorophyll, and now becoming tinged with the dry scent of brown. The grass cuts with brittle ease and dustiness, its aroma no longer robust and optimistic, but efficient as it redirects its energy in preparation for dormancy. According to the calendar, the summer season is over. Driving into the neighborhood, I notice a little boy intently pushing a colorful plastic mower as his daddy works the big machine. When his enthusiasm will end is unpredictable, but it is certain that everything he plays at now will one day become work as he moves through his seasons. As I move from one season to the next, I look with trepidation at tree debris and closets and storage bins. I want to relish all that seems so God-given in New England - woodland walks and harvests, pies and applesauce, campfires and hot cider, stoops arranged with still-life’s of pumpkins, mums and scarecrows fashioned from old clothes stuffed with leaves – but the preparation frenzy takes over like a wicked witch, the threat of the first frost breathes down my neck like a haunting ghost and I fret that the house will not be prepared for hibernation. But why? Nature is designed to occur rather than to be monkeyed with. No one rakes the forest floor. The harvest simply happens; fruits and vegetables can fall without us. No one tells the flowers to die; they take their cues from thin air. The whole of nature marches, no, processes, while human systems fight the ebb and flow, making us soldiers in battles of dubious importance, prompting us to conjure up inventions like the treadmill and stir up trouble with the climate. If I were following my nature right now, I wouldn’t be thinking about the lawn, I would be slicing Cortland’s for a French apple pie or falling into the hammock with the Sunday paper or a book. By the time that plastic mower wears out, that little boy won’t have to worry about fixing or replacing it; he will be too old for it. He will begin to discover himself and rebel at mowing the lawn, refusing a mother’s request. Then he may move to the offer of mowing – for a price – because the boy down the street gets remuneration. But one day he may notice the length of the grass, do it without being asked and perhaps receive a homemade apple pie as ‘remuneration’ - also without being asked. I wonder if he will be able to balance the voluntary and the required, to not tip the scale too much one way or the other, to gracefully redirect his energy and embrace the flow without the fret, remembering the plastic mower and noticing that the smell of green has changed.

FIELD NOTES

You glance out the window and see a squirrel; someone walks past you or stands next to you; you are waiting at the drive-thru in the rain; you are driving a long distance: a dialogue goes on in your head whether you are aware of it or not. If we are pre-conditioned about what is supposed to be 'important', it will leave our consciousness like sand through a sieve. But place a pan underneath the sieve (or a note pad in our hands) and we may find a treasure. Trying to capture that, I come to this place out of a sense of obligation; an obligation to record what I see (and sense), to translate into words and images what I believe is often missed in the otherwise ordinary passing of days. It is an obligation to notice what it is like to be alive at this very moment rather than being defined by how I choose (or am bound) to make ends meet every month and how impressive a resume I can build. According to averages (and genetics) this may be the second half of my life – more or less. For my purposes here, approaching each entry as just that - one entry – is a haven not only from deadlines, but expectations as well; it is a freedom that feels like doodling in the margins or drawing with sidewalk chalk. Each day I look forward to finding something to write down. My notes land here, for the most part, ‘as is’ - no plot or teacherly story web or writing diamond; they meander, they float, they drift, the only conclusion they will have will be themselves. As writing samples, they may be quirky, but perhaps quirks are the random breezes (the ones that move a wind chime, lift a wing or nod a sunflower's head) among the prescriptions, self-help and motivational ‘secrets’ that load store shelves. A good scientist goes into the field with hypotheses, not results. A good writer develops character before conclusion. A good artist observes before interpreting. Each day we are compelled to survive, we must forage, hunt, gather and defend, but that is not all that is striking, that is not all that is sensual or brilliant or unusual, that is not what I most need you to know about me. Pretend you have just seated yourself on a bench, next to me. If you don’t know me, then pretend you do. If you do know me, then pretend you don’t. Sit beside me without the urge to fill in the silences and wait, just wait. Maybe we’ll notice something. Together.