goosing the poet

geese again!

what is it with the wild geese
here's yet another poem
telling how someone's heart lept
telling how new hope was born on their wings
but tell me, what kind of life is that
like rock stars, they bring us momentary joy,
excitement, forgetfulness of self
and then they are gone in the freezing sky
a damp and dangerous life of wandering, homeless
and what about the tame geese?
what's wrong with 3 square meals and a cozy shed?
a few responsibilities, guarding the house or bullying the sheep?
perhaps a swift death and an afterlife as a quilt
not the cruelty of a broken wing, a coyote family feast?


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FIRST SNOW ~ Irene cleanup retrospective

here it is!  always sneaks in when we aren't looking.

and i found this on my camera from September 5, the brave crew of volunteers who chloroxed my cellar ~ too bad i didn't think "photo op" the week before when these folks and others as well shoveled a foot of muck and stone from the cellar into buckets and brigaded it up the stairs, across the dining room, and out to the road.  boy were they a mess by the end of the process!  what a wonderful bunch of folks, some from town, some from the Shambhala center, and some from other towns and states!

hard times

i never wanted to live in the woods or high up in the hills with a great view but no neighbors in sight, even though this is the dream of so many folks who move to Vermont.  i like to look out my window and see houses with lights in their windows, and kids on bikes, and dogs being walked.

my neighbor across the street - i'll bet i only had about 5 conversations with her, mostly just saying hello, nice day, but i knew her so well and she probably knew us just as well. i watched her toddlers play in mud puddles, learn to ride bikes, go off to school, have pool parties when they got a big above ground pool, learn to drive!  Their tiny dog always had something to say when I went out the front door.

likewise my neighbor to the south - 2 big dogs outside always greeted us from their tie-lines as we came and went. we talked to them and patted them, and worried that one would escape the line and come jump on me affectionately! these dogs were big! and friendly!  we did try to talk to those neighbors, but they were strangely private and mysterious.  i hope the dogs are ok wherever they have all disappeared to.

neither place will have xmas lights this year to brighten the winter darkness ...they stand empty.  one neighbor moved due to her health, the house is for sale. the other folks mysteriously vanished two months ago, and courteous strangers sent by a bank have been taking photos, asking questions, planning to spruce it up i hope.

the house behind ours will be dark soon, too, sold out to our local Very Rich Man who has a history of buying houses and removing them, gaining a prettier view while eliminating a decent family home. we will be like an island here!  perhaps we should consider putting up xmas lights.  do they make them shaped like little Buddhas?

Shocktober Thriller Dance time again!

yesterday Raglan Shire celebrated Shocktober with their annual Thriller dance!

click to enlarge

getting lined up and synchronized is...  it's alot like herding cats... and bunnehs and pups and otters and ferrets and and and everything else too! 

BOO!

there are cobwebs on my blog!  is it neglect....or SHOCKTOBER!
it's shocktober in Raglan Shire and mudpie and friends went to the haunted house.
mudpie ("mud" to her friends) had this to say:
it wuz so skarey i 4got to take pitchurs until we sat down to catch our breaf!
rats chased us, a spider almost got us, we got roasted in da oven, and den
running from a tiny-eating plant got caught by a skeletenoid!
zombies cudn't eat our brains cuz we haz none.

mud & a friend wearing jack-o-lantern masks - don't be scared!

going away party

mindfulness

ever so carefully stepping
firmly on each narrow step
down our steep new-england stairway
i in my flip-flops
long bathrobe
reading glasses
practice total concentration
to carry a jar in one hand
the other hand steadily pressing an index card to the top
as i place each foot just so
one foot after the other
one eye on the spider in the jar
soon to learn that the world is a very big place

~_^

the song garden

yesterday T. (not just a pretty face) took me for tea in the morning to a place he'd just discovered in new hampshire, about 1/2 hour drive.

you turn onto a dirt road and drive and drive for what seems like it must surely be the wrong road, and then you come to a wide meadowy place
overlooking distant hills and the mts of vermont, and there is a very large flower garden consisting of rows of flowers arranged in rows by color.

at the entrance to the garden are scissors, baskets, sun hats, jars, ribbons, flower-preserver packets.
you can go in and cut whatever flowers you like to take home with you!
there is a box if you want to leave a donation.

if you walk up the hill there is a small one-room cabin with chairs on a tiny screened porch and a tiny deck on another side.
inside is a table and chairs, set with a lace cloth, china dishes and teacups, fresh flower arrangement.
along the sides are all kinds of interesting objects, plus a big electric container of hot water, all kinds of teas,
a little fridge with half and half, a little sink to leave your cup in, a daybed with lots of pillows, classical music playing. 

nobody is there.  you are invited by signs to have tea, have a scone or biscotti or granola bar, use the china, etc, wander around, and leave a donation.
you can buy or take some pot pourri and leave money in the box.

and up the hill a bit further is a pleasant outhouse!

isn't that amazing?  it was such a beautiful sunny day and so relaxing, that in the afternoon i dragged john over for afternoon tea and he loved it too!

a message from the west coast

you wouldn't think a greeting card would do much for someone still digging out from a hurricane and flooding, but this one has helped lots!  i have it posted right on my big kitchen window where i see it many times a day.  thank you Candy!

some things about hurrican irene's effects on the residents of my village

a truck went into the flooding river - did the road give way? ms O tied a cable to her car, other end to her husband (some say it was an extension cord) and in he went to pull the guy out of the truck.  once he had the guy, D. drove her car away pulling them from the river minutes before the flash flood of the jumped river came down and took the truck away.

during the storm we were evacuated at the fire station. nobody could get any information. that night we could get home to our house, after the rain let up and the flood stopped rising. still no way to get information. but then we started getting calls from friends (we have an old wired phone we hooked up) who were telling us what they saw on TV - where the storm was and what we could expect during the night.  we had calls from california, south carolina, ohio, and even ethiopia!

that night i looked down from the upstairs window into the wind tossed black-black electricityless night and saw for the first and probably last time in my life foxfire softly glowing on a rotten log below!

early in the morning after, mr A arrives at the village mom & pop store with a check for $1000 and the instruction that anyone needing food should be given it free.  food was free all day to all comers anyway.

partly because the store had no generator to keep the freezers going.  lots and lots of food was sent up to the volunteer fire dept, as was all the food from the school (it was to have been the first day of school) and a big cookout blowout town wide dinner was held at the fire dept for anyone who could get there.

later the store located a generator to use, but food remained free to all for the rest of the day. the streets were full of people all day, exchanging information and help, and the volunteer firemen were everywhere pumping out cellars and giving out whatever supplies they could. by the next day the national guard had arrived with bottled water, MRE meals, cleaning supplies and more. mr X who has his own helicopter went back and forth overhead taking arial photos for whatever use may come in the future.

early the morning after, old mr O started calling the government to get permission to volunteer to work on the flooding.  after many hours he got the OK and took his Great Big Yellow Machine to the flood where he spent all afternoon and half the night clearing under the bridge, digging the riverbed back to where it belonged, and when he was done the river was back in it's bed, altho of course everything it carried off, including the road, was still gone. i think he had the time of his life!

as the assessment and pumping continued all day, the street was like a party - no traffic could go, but everyone was out walking and talking. two of the firemen were catching 3 and 4 inch trout from sinkholes with their bare hands, and taking them back to the river.

.

tired and muddy!

less than a week and the road to the south is passable again!
i drive out to shower at kathe's, stupified by the new scenery,
the young who rioted in london were a puff of air
compared to the rioting of vermont brooks
let loose from their beds for a day to rearrange the landscape to their liking.
here and there i pass a house that looks solid and untouched
my heart leaps with the wish that i lived there.

something glowing

last night we slept fitfully waiting for the wind that follows the eye, listening even as we dozed off and on, still dressed and downstairs in case a tree, one of the many big big maples now rooted in nothing but soft deep mud should fall on the house. there was not a light in the village because there was no electricity and the stars THE STARS were a wonder beyond telling and as i gasped at a shooting star above i glanced down at the grass below the window and something was glowing.
what glows at 2 am? a wind-dropped solar light would not be still bright, reflective paint would have nothing to reflect, a rectangular glowing shape in the grass maybe 18" long and 2 or 3 wide. nothing in my experience could explain this.
the next morning on the back porch i remembered the glowing thing and looked over where i'd seen it.  and there it was.  an old rotten piece of tree branch.

making vinegar

friends used to talk about fruit flies - even get into animated conversations with strangers - it was some class i guess i didn't sign up for....breeding fruit flies.

my neighbor has given me a big bowl of blackberries from her bushes. 

or are they black raspberries?  the internet says: Black raspberries become hollow in the middle when picked from the main plant whereas the blackberries retain its stem.

must be black raspberries.

last year i froze much of what she gave me, then never knew what to do with them. 

so this year i am making vinegar. 

here's how:

cover berries with water.

mash them up.

pour into a sterilized jar (i boiled a large canning jar for a bit)

cover with cloth and a rubber band (i used a flowered handkerchief i found in my drawer - where/when did i ever get that?)

wait 3 months or so until the mother (gloop on top) falls to bottom and then pour off the vinegar!

sounds easier than the saurkraut i tried to make last year and ended up throwing away !

but what about the fruit flies?

they seem to like the idea, and gather on the top.  what are they doing?  

if they are sitting, ok, but if they are laying eggs or pooping, i'm not happy about that.

i can't see that they are leaving anything there...they just seem to like to gather in the vinegary atmosphere.

i guess i should have taken that class!

another baby story

must be baby season!  everyone's having them recently!  
i admit i'm not up on the latest trends in childbirth and baby care, so when these pictures came via email of friends and their newborn, i was very surprised!  
decided i'd better disguise them, they might not want to be blogged.
you think there's people who object to women nursing in public, wait'll they see THIS on the subway!

it is too much to be too long anywhere*

we always moved before 4 years, and usually not that long when i was a kid.
but i've lived HERE many times that now.
now everywhere HERE tells me stories. where cats are buried, where we played softball, where houses stood, where my friend was killed in a car accident, where my baby learned to swim.

everything is impermanent.
when you move around you don't notice this.
when you stay still things change around you like a slow carousel or a fractal kaleidoscope.

now a new baby has been born to a village family, and i am one of the few in the village who might recall that once upon a time another baby was born to that house. 

that house has had a few owners since then.

the tiny years-ago baby died of crib death, so heart-breaking that now i irrationally fear for this new little boy.
i tried for days to remember the name of the other little boy, to assure myself they don't have the same name! finally i remembered -- and to my relief it is not the same. 

i'll never say anything about this to anyone if i can help it, but it's a hard thing to know.

* said gimme the ax in the rootabaga stories

Perseids answer the crickets - summer is ending

dark before 9 now
takes us by surprise - and lo!
meteor showers!

driving through the night
shooting stars distract our
watch for deer on the road

                                                         ~mudpie

nothing gold can stay

summer's perfect day
until i heard the cricket

and knew all was lost

                                     ~mudpie

the biography of cancer

i never thought a book about cancer would hold my attention so completely. cancer is not a subject i want to even think about. but awhile back, the NYT had a fascinating article about The Emperor of All Maladies, and i suggested to the local librarian that he should purchase it. he said "sure, who's gonna read THAT!"  to my surprise, he did buy it -- even before it won the pulitzer prize! so then of course i had to at least sign it out and begin to read it. and something about the way it is written kept me reading. 

the author has a love for his profession and also for all of the great poetic scientist-writers. soon i was drawn into the stories of trials, theories, frustrations, successes, life and death, pride and battle, and enjoying the writer's vocabulary and use of words. over and over i was pleased and impressed by tangential quotes and references, the breadth of awareness beyond the medical world. i began stealing sly peeks at the author's photo and the brief bio on the back flyleaf.

that was it. i fell in love. if i were 13 i would put siddhartha mukerjee's picture on my wall and maybe write him a fan letter!  ironically, he totally looked like he should be dreamily holding a cigarette (smoking is one of the things in the book that gets him steamed).

400 pages and then another 100 of notes, index, bibliography, appendix. hard to believe i am sorry to have finished a book i would have expected to be gross and joyless.  and how does cancer's biography end? what's our prognosis?  well no spoilers, you'll have to read it for yourself!

more owl pellets - they do regurgitate most curiously!

often i've read that one cannot interpret the dreams of others, only the dreamer can say what it means.  to that i say "pish-tosh." i love to interpret other people's dreams!  just now i am puzzling over a friend's dream involving an aggressive scary nebulous thing in an attic.

we all know that the cellar can represent a trip into your darkest hidden self  eeeewwwwwwww!  and discovering new unsuspected rooms on your house...that's always fun!

but an attic?

(click to enlarge)

in this dream the dreamer is helping out a friend whose house is haunted. our dreamer climbs the stairs alone to the friend's attic to take a look around and perhaps help.  but instead of getting an idea of what sort of boggart was haunting his friend's house, he entered the attic and was immediately rushed by a formless threatening something-or-other -- it INSTANTLY RUSHED TOWARDS HIM!

(click to enlarge)

well of course he screamed and woke up.  too bad!! i'd be curious to know what happened next. was this cloud-like thing going to cloud his mind? or maybe envelope him entirely. or maybe just pass right through him in an escape down the stairs through the door he just opened!

maybe the attic's a place of dryness and reasonableness, the higher thoughts of humans. 
perhaps our dreamer tried to help his friend, using logic and reason, only to find himself attacked by something he can't grasp nor make no sense of?

and at the same time, the attic is the repository of someone's past.  all locked up in trunks and stored safely out of the way where it can be forgotten and ignored.

in which case he has entered his friend's past, which attacks and terrifies him, or he has entered his own past --  there's the fun of dreams, because in a dream, they say, you play all parts, and he is the friend, and the helper, and the house, and the SCARY THING too!
or is that more pish-tosh?

owl pellets

(click to enlarge)

my dear friend,

i am sorry i did not do a thorough serious job interpreting your dream, but sometimes it takes me awhile.
i'm the same with movies -- a day or so after seeing a movie, i'll suddenly say "oh NOW i get it!"

you were running through a field of lavender!  so wonderful! but i never asked you what lavender is to you. don't people use it to scent their linen closet? their bedsheets? or is it the scent that helps people sleep? i would like to know. 

in any case, you were moving energetically through a lovely free open bright unencumbered world!

and you tripped and fell.

well we all understand this on some level!  this is life. this is impermanence, yes, thank you Buddha, we get it.

notice, though, it was not a rainstorm, or a monster, or a thank you Freud snake, nor your parents appearing from behind a tree, that ended the bliss.  you did it yourself.

isn't this so very feminine....blame ourselves! i would advise you (and all of us) to watch for this. not to shake a finger and say bad girl, but to pat yourself indulgently, fondly, and say "silly there you go again."

you must tell me sometime, did you trip on a stone, or your own shoelace, or even worse did your own feet get tangled?  you see, it makes a difference in understanding.

the good news is, you were still in that lovely scented paradise.  you were down but not out. ready to lie there and enjoy or get up and run further.  and frankly, i don't believe it was a fall by your own clumsiness.  i think really, something over which you had no control, something that is actually someone else's problem, perhaps someone's thoughtlessly abandoned shoe lying hidden in the lavender, is what you tripped on.

i will have to give it some more thought. 

what IS a meadow for?

what IS a meadow for?

i'm sitting on my meditation cushion
and in the morning sunlight i can see
faint green diagonal lines
behind the strongly buttery yellow walls.
the old wallpaper.
i remember my cousin roger's room
years and years, paint after paint
i could still see the cowboys from his childhood wallpaper if i knew what i was looking for.
isn't it a wonderful metaphor?
open the gate and let the cows in to graze.

*************