Come out for a walk

One of the last of winter. We've been sitting here at our computers long enough.

Lean your head down under the apple tree, I don't want us to knock the pretty snow off. Oh, and I don't want you to bump your head either. Follow me toward the sun.

Oh, is that a deer? Or a giraffe? I think he might let us ride him through the woods.

Now we're in the meadow, which we call the Queens Bowl. Queen Anne's lace is wearing Winter Queen's lace. Oh, that's ok, you don't have to curtsy, I am only bowing to take their photograph.

Oh look, Rose's hips are wearing lace too. That sounds a bit racy, don't you think?

These dangling seeds look out of sorts, I'd say. But my hands are getting cold, so I am out of sorts too.

Let's head back.

Hi there, Bishop. That spot in the sun looks inviting.

Good idea, let's go in and stretch out by the fire after our workout.

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inches & finches: another layer of winter . . .

. . . four white inches and counting. The birds that had been away scouting easy food on the land for 10 days are back and gorging at the feeders. I counted 30 finches at this one maple tree alone. There weren't any perches left for this amazing hanging goldfishfinch. A split second later he was clutching the tree bark waiting his turn. I get the feeling the other finches are looking at him like "wow, how do you do that?" I know I was.

These three - American tree sparrow, goldfinch and downy woodpecker - managed to share the tower. How's that for Love Day behavior?

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two rain haiku

winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) on my University's campus

haiku #1

FAITH

Faith is aconite

rising in February

warm in the snow bed

-Ruth M.

Normally aconite would rise in snow in February. This week it rose in rain, which I photographed, above. I wrote the haiku several years ago, when there was snow on the ground. I would not have known about aconite if it weren't for the composition professor whose office was next to mine. Professor Ellison provided expert and generous help with my writing assignments while I completed a BA in English part time. One snowy February day, he poked his bright face that defied gravity's wrinkles through my door and asked if I had seen the aconite blooming over by the river yet? "Aconite?" said I, clueless. "What's that?"

When I found out what it was, and saw it, I wrote this haiku. It's a simple poem, but the concept of a flower blooming in February in Michigan is profound.

Aconite is part of the buttercup family. Buttercup is a much more pleasant and fitting word than aconite - IMHO.

haiku #2

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

Writing his imagist haiku-like poem, Ezra Pound whittled thirty lines down to 14 words. He wrote it after being deeply moved by the beauty of faces in a crowd at the Paris Métro station La Concorde. "In a Station of the Metro" was one of the first poems I studied in poetry class. Now when I see black tree limbs in the rain, Mr. Pound's image comes to mind, then the words. This tree, below, is my favorite beech here on campus. The photo above is our spirea bush at home.

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rescued glass

Since our sweet Lesley and Brian are getting married here at the farm this summer, Don and I are into the details of spiffing up the scene for the event. We both love this special excuse to tend to the farm, which will be a nice setting for the vintage-rustic-elegance Lesley envisions. Believe me, it looks a little too rustic right now, if you know what I mean.

Les has always shopped at thrift stores, and so it seems fitting to use previously used or borrowed things in the "something old" and "something borrowed" categories in the old British wedding custom for the bride:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a silver sixpence in her shoe.

On freecycle Don found a lady who sorts clear glass at a local recycling center and couldn't bear letting these gorgeous bottles get ground up for the next piece of glass. So she gently loaded them in boxes to give away. In fact, she had a few boxes on her porch being picked up by freecyclers. (I got inspired for these photos by Artsy T at flickr. How cool!)

Lesley envisions sunflowers in these bottles on the dinner tables.

We have ordered sunflower seeds by the hundreds. Besides standing in bottles and canning jars, they will also be a backdrop for the ceremony and punctuation around the farm. I hope they'll bloom right when we need them to, but if they don't, the green leafy stalks will be pretty anyway.

In the whorl of Life that is continually recycling, sunflower seeds fall to the ground, germinate and grow into tall new plants the following season. There's really nothing new under the sun, like this tender new love, fresh and bright, that is part of a very old human cycle. How amazing!

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Harold & Sid

Here are two nice looking men in the 1920s or 30s. (They don't look like they're posing at all.) The one on the left, Harold, is pretty famous in those funny glasses. Recognize him? (No, he's not Tom Daschle.) The one on the right, Sidney, was fairly famous at the time. Now, only a handful of people would know who he is. Don't feel bad if you don't recognize him. Many of you won't even know the one on the left, though you should.

Sidney was a prominent astrologer in the '20s, '30s and '40s, had a column in the New York Daily News, and published Wynn's Astrology Magazine, including astrological charts of Hollywood stars, such as the chap on the left. Sidney developed a system that is still used by astrologers based on the solar return (the sun's return to its position in a birth chart, which occurs every seven years), which he called the "Key Cycle."

His birthday is February 10 (1892). I should know him personally, because he is my grandfather, Sidney Bennett, aka "Wynn," but I never met him, and neither did any of my family except my mom. She only saw him a few times after he and her mom (Grandma Olive) divorced when she was six. He went on to marry and divorce several more times, had children by his other wives, had a show for a while in Las Vegas, ended up living a strange life in New Zealand (they say he lived in caves) and died in the 1970s. I remember being a teenager answering that phone call from NZ for my mom from someone who had news about her dad when he died.

I don't follow astrology, although it's fun to read what Rob Brezsny has to say because he's smart and funny. Sidney predicted the future. I've seen some of his columns in the NY Daily News that were torn apart by readers when they didn't come to pass. These days astrologers talk more about trends, tendencies - like you might feel energetic for work today, or you might feel unsocial and need time to be quiet, or whatever. A bit safer than predicting what will happen next week or next year.

Maybe we've evolved in the last 7 or 8 decades. We're not quite as gullible as folks were then. In old movies you recognize the naïveté that existed. We no longer believe everything we're told, and with changes happening more rapidly, we know that anything that comes to pass will likely transform into something better or worse in the near future.

It's interesting to think that when my grandfather was a teller of fortunes, times were tough. It was the Great Depression. People cared about movie stars and their star charts. Doesn't it astonish you when you see a glam 1930s movie of tuxedoes and ball gowns, to know that some people in the movie theaters then were scratching to make a living, lucky to have food to eat, let alone a job? They longed to escape their misery and fantasize in long, deep mink stoles and automobiles.

How fake actors in the 1930s sound! Like they're feigning a British accent but it sounds like stupid American-Eastern-Snob-talk. (Still, I love me some Katharine Hepburn in "Philadelphia Story.") Today, we demand honest talk from politicians and film stars. As much as we complain about not getting straight answers from our government and the like, if you look back at popular culture, you'll see that we are a bit more wise. But I hope we'll get wiser, and quickly, in the days ahead.

Happy Birthday, Sid. Hope that's not disrespectful, but I can't bring myself to call you "Grandpa" since I never met you.

Here's a short clip of Harold.

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from light to dark in a few hours

One year we lived near the railroad tracks in a depressed little town north of here. Dad took a small church as pastor - in an act of kindness, I think. The church basement smelled of mildew, and only a handful of the townspeople attended. My dad always cared about poor communities and so-called lost causes. But after less than a year we moved back to our old home town. Dad went into a new line of work, no longer a pastor.

A bright spot in the year of the dingy, depressed town was a family of five beautiful girls. It was as if Sweden had airlifted a gift and set them down gently for all of us to enjoy beside the lake where they lived. Not that they were Swedish, I don't think they were, but they were perpetually blonde and tan, with the whitest teeth, biggest eyes and sweetest dimples. They charmed us all with their worldly innocence. It didn't hurt that they also had a colored TV. (This was 1966, so: Flipper the dolphin, and funny-wacky-leggy Phyllis Diller in flashy dresses and spiked hair and ankle boots.)

My 14-year-old brother was in love with one of the gifts - Candy, who was his age. Yes, that was really her name.

One summer evening after dinner he asked me to walk to their house, and I was happy to, since Candy's sister Barb was 10 like me. Off we trotted down the tracks, which led us straight to a radiant evening in Sweden-land. Even the girls' mother was full of cheerful goodwill and prettiness.

Time flew as we played, laughed and ate chocolate chip cookies, and before we knew it, dusk was falling. Reluctantly, we said good-bye to Candy, Barb, and the gang, and skipped the mile and a half home over the tracks as the sky darkened.

Arriving home in the dark, we recognized immediately that our house was not so full of cheer and prettiness as the cottage of the blonde beauties. Our poor dad and mom had no idea where we had been for the past 4 hours! My brother, four years older than I, had not mentioned our plans to them. As the younger guilty party, I was not deemed as culpable, so I did not suffer the sound whipping he did.

I wonder if my brother thinks of the family by the lake with guilty pleasure as I do.

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journaling

Introspective people like to keep a journal.

This is just a sample of the journals I have. All but one (the orange spiral) was given to me by discerning friends and family. Lesley got the pretty brown-green-aqua set on the right and the olive ribbon one as giveaways at design shows. So nice that she thinks of her mother.

There is promise in empty white pages, and the time and effort of writing down thoughts and feelings means my own life is special, important. I can work through problems or figure out my mind.

I also confess that I take narcissistic pleasure in seeing my own hand writing, even though my weak wrists have caused it to deteriorate seriously. But even in my chaotic scribbles there is comfort. As someone said, the act of writing by hand feels connected to the heart. Because this is true for me, I often start a poem by writing down initial thoughts by hand, then typing them into a Word doc for easy editing.

Most of the white pages in the books above have not one mark on them. The truth is that I don't do much writing in journals any more, though I value it.

There's no denying that blogging has taken the place of some journal writing. We all expose ourselves in varying degrees in these public spaces, but private thoughts can still be hidden between the pretty covers of a blank book. Now if I'd been journaling lately, I might have written down how nice it was to get the Blog of Note honor, that it stretched my capacity to keep up, and that I'm tickled to be off the main Blog of Note blog page now. I am enjoying new friends, and I am quite happy to have things settle back to a dull roar, as we used to say at our house.

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