Summer visit; a memory thread

 

We all went for a walk looking for wild raspberries during their summertime visit. My older granddaughter had asked to hold my camera. I was taking pictures with my phone because of the beautiful late afternoon light. I didn't notice until looking at the pictures that she was swinging my camera by the string in a bored teenage manner, even though she is only just turned nine. How quickly they grow!

Here  is a poem by Charles Wright from Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition 
(Kindle page 238-239)

American Twilight

Why do I love the sound of children's voices in 

  unknown games

So much on a summer's night,

Lightning bugs lifting heavily out of the dry grass

Like alien spacecraft looking for higher ground,

Darkness beginning to sift like coffee grains 

                                               over the neighborhood?

Whunk of a ball being kicked,

Surfsuck and surf-spill from traffic along the by-pass,

American twilight,

            Venus just lit in the third heaven,

Time-tick between, "Okay, let's go," and "This earth is 

  not my home."

Why do I care about this? Whatever happens will happen

With or without us,

            with or without these verbal amulets.

In the first ply, in the heavens of the moon, a little light,

Half-light, over Charlottesville.

Trees reshape themselves, the swallows disappear, lawn

   sprinklers do the wave.

Nevertheless, it's still summer: cicadas pump their

  boxes,

Jack Russell terriers, as they say, start barking their heads 

  off.

And someone, somewhere, is putting his first foot, then

  the second,

Down on the other side,

           no hand to help him, no tongue to wedge its weal.

                                         1999

And now we are deep into winter; Amtrack trains are getting stuck in the snow; homeless people are probably freezing to death. Yet this firefly summer exists, for those of us who have been there. I think this is a terrific poem! I am glad to have found it; it inspires me to try something again myself. Hope you are warm enough tonight, 

Uncle Chris Carlsen gives a tractor ride

His wife was the sister of my mother-in-law. He ran a farm in Liberty, Idaho his entire adult life. Whenever we came for a summer visit to our relatives in Grace, Idaho, Maud Carlsen gave us a feast of delicious farm-raised food. It was like another world, one which is much more rare now, I think. From the left, my younger son, Kipp (we called him Kippy then, but he won't let us now;) next, Chris's grandaughter, Marlene (I think) then a boy who may be cousin Jeff Hill, then my older son Bradford, holding our newly adopted daughter, Michele. Marlene is the kid who told me on that same visit (when I was showing a "cow" to Kipp,) "That's not a cow, that's a bull!! She really knew her way around that farm, too! This is probably the summer of 1972.

Thinking about the past is sort of inevitable at my age, I guess. It is easy to fall into, especially with the aid of old family pictures.

the new year
I sift through pictures
from the old ones

"Temple Twilight Snow"

so others also

hear in Shinoda fields at

temple twilight snow

Hakuin 

from One Man's Moon 50 Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, Hakuin, Shiki, Santoka; versions by Cid Corman, Gnomon Press, 1984. Page 29.

***

 I think I will just leave this juxtaposition alone. It's a new year, 

and there will be plenty of time for making sense later..

   

Mrs. Mallard seems to know who she is

and what she should be doing, I have admired her self-possession as well as her plumage, and her lovely bright orange feet, which show up so beautifully against the snow. I'm missing my Idaho ducks already and plan to go on a birdwalk tomorrow at a local creek and pond with the Santa Clara County Audubon group to see what I can spot here in California. My front yard towhee seems to be in daily residence, also.  

I'm missing my friend, Pat Shelley who died in 1997, soon after the death 

of my beloved brother, Robert. That was a rough time for me.

Pat Shelley sometimes had to work hard for self-confidence, but she was always honest and forthright about her feelings. She was pretty attentive to her plumage, too, and always fixed herself up prettily.

From her book, The Rice Papers, Saratoga Trunk, 1992,

here are two of her short poems. 

Salt cellars on the table

shaped like birds remind me 

it will rain---for the mallards

made a great to-do this morning

and I have been weeping

(page 8)

This sparrow

is indeed a plain bird

alone on the telephone wire

casting eager glances

She reminds me of myself

(page 15)

It interests me to see that in this economical form, Pat chooses to begin with the conventional capital letter, but feels no need of the period, even when she begins another sentence before the end of the poem.

This strikes me as a good set of choices.

I must go now and do my small watercolor. 

I hope to make one I like better than last night's.

Sleep well, and dream of birds, their bright wings and soft feathers.

Chain Saws, a memory thread

We got our younger son a Husqvarna for Christmas, and within the week I found this picture of my father in a tree with a pretty substantial-looking yellow chainsaw. I'm guessing this is when they were taking down the American elms (vanquished by Dutch Elm disease) at The Farm. My brother will have to corroborate because I had left home by this time. I don't recognize the other fellow.
I used this picture to suggest my sketch for yesterday. It is wierd.
It is always a pleasure to me to find a picture of my father that I hadn't seen or remembered. I have modeled myself after him in so many ways! Our initials are the same, and I based my signature on his: two initials and the last name, which begins with an "H" in both cases. So every time I sign a check or one of those interminable sheets of permissions in a doctor's office, I can smile as I remember him!

I have been planning to bring poetry back strongly into this blog. The poetry books are shelved upstairs, but the haiku books are downstairs and behind me where I now work at the dining room table, getting my computers set up for use here (printer drivers, etc.) and making my 15 pieces of art for the new year.

So we will begin with this from Santoka, as translated by Cid Corman in Walking Into the Wind,

well which way
go
with the wind blowing
(#15)

I think will try to walk with the wind this year and not spend quite so much time encouched or in bed.
Wish me luck!

Looking for Potential

I've been fond of this: last spring my neighbor, Bernie, put up a nest box (he got the plans from a magazine) for the local wood ducks [Aix sponsa.] I took this picture two days later. At the far left, you can see the couple who are staking their claim by standing on the box. The female made several forays inside to check on suitability.
On the branch at right, waiting for possible developments, are two more pair. This was 75 percent of the local ducks. And 100 percent of the nest boxes I knew about. We left the house by The Little Union Canal before we could see any nesting or hatching activity. But somethings must have gone all right, because this winter, when we came back, we have 10 pair of wood ducks, instead of four. Good things can still happen in America!

The furnace got restored to health today! It took the heating guy more than two hours to install the new "board" and now we have HEAT. I think the dachshunds are already missing the heated lap throw.

This was day two of the 15-day art challenge. I tried something a little more complex, and I actually like a trial sketch of something else better, What I have found in two days only is that there are plenty of ideas, and they spring forth as soon as one picks up the brush. I have an improvised "studio"on the dining room table, but, for possible greater productivity, I should set up a better place to paint. I am not very messy, though, so it is OK.

Memory Thread: The first time I took part in a local museum's Monotype Marathon (Artists spent all day making spontaneous prints in various local print studios, and one print from each artist was chosen to be auctioned off to raise funds for the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Jose.) I worked in a studio with a vibrant, noisy woman in paint-spattered clothing who actually threw paint. She took great pride in being messy, and kept promoting it as part of her persona. There was as much paint as cloth visible on her jeans. Other artists shielded their prints and blank paper as well as they could, but some things were ruined. I don't remember if anyone did anything, but the climate was quite unhappy. Are you a messy artist or a neat one? Be sure to leave room for art, or some sort of "making" jewelry, embroidery, beading, quilting or knitting in 2014.

Have a blessed 2014!

Couldn't this wait until next year?

OLGA WITH CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

Happily back on the real information highway! One of Olga's great-grandaughters wants to see a picture she has heard about from her parents who remember seeing it in my mother's home. So I've been wandering through the Flickrchives in search and found this instead. As with the one of Marjory, it is taken in front of the mantel of the house in Shaker Heights. Mom looks pretty good, but this was a time of real struggle for her with a breakdown and midlife crisis in the recent past.

I think the lighting here is from the clip-on flood that we used for indoor movies and slides in this era. It is aimed a little too high. I think we don't know how lucky we are to get automatically well-exposed photos in almost any indoor and outdoor light situation.

I am hoping you all had a splendid holiday time; we are all supposed to, you know. . .But watch out for these suppositions, they could kill ya. Here's what I was doing, with four grandkids just the right ages for the season. And football in the background.

Settling in here after a year away is quite the deal. What is in the freezer? Where are the AAA batteries? Did S leave his reading glasses by the computer in Idaho? Right now, I am sitting on my heated throw (furnace fixer comes back tomorrow with the new Motherboard) which has turned out to be a HUGE success with the dachshunds. They were BORN for this! Such complete repose on a warm surface.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to poetry. Right now tomorrow seems very far away. I did make a watercolor postcard for my 15-day art challenge. And started writing in my new Lama Li notebook with the beautiful handmade paper. And put away about seven million items. And now I am whinging to my friends.

first day of the year
when the furnace is broken
dachshunds cuddle