January 31: Roar

This morning I awoke to a roar outside that made me think for a brief instant that I was back in my usual bedroom on Monhegan hearing the sound of the surf pounding the island's rocky shore. Instead, gale force winds and driving rain engulfed the house with a loud, malevolent energy, flinging branches. Lights flickered. The river, wild with storm water, added its own white noise to the scene.

A co-worker's child told him the trees blowing outside their house this morning looked like "angry hair."

A few hours later, however, all is calm. Big patches of blue sky shine behind breaking clouds. The trees barely stir, and the temperature is almost the same outside as it is in. Ah, the vagaries of the weather in New England.

Roar of the sea familiar
outside my bedroom window.
I wish I were back there.

January 30: Budding

So strangely warm today that the crusty snow was sublimating into puffs of mist that drifted across the road like ghostly tumbleweeds. A dense fog settled over the dripping trees. Not a great day to be outside. But inside, our amaryllis slowly opens into slightly erotic hot-red buds, twin points of brightness.

Foggy evening.
Bright amaryllis buds
stretch toward the window.

January 29: Micro-moments

I read this at Atlantic.com today:

"In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.
Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
Rather, it is what she calls a 'micro-moment of positivity resonance.' She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in 'It's a Wonderful World' when he sang, 'I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"

You can read the whole article here. I'm not sure I agree with the overall premise of the piece--especially as I see further down my Facebook stream a photo of a couple I know who were childhood sweethearts and still going strong, celebrating their 47th anniversary today. But the concept of a "micro-moment of positivity resonance" struck me as a real experience, akin to the moment that often inspires haiku--that ephemeral burst of perception and mood the poem tries to capture. So as I look back on my day, I'm trying to think of a moment when I felt something like this "micro-moment of positivity resonance." This is what I came up with.

Back to work after a sick day.

A co-worker tells me

he missed me. 

January 28: Two goldfinches

Home sick today I spent almost the entire time on the couch, reading and napping with the cat stretched out alongside me. When I first got up, I had the good fortune to catch sight of an eagle flying upriver, white tail flared like a flag. It paused in the backyard until chased off by crows. That drama past, the rest of my day was occasionally brightened by the appearance of two goldfinches at the window feeder, taking their time each visit to chow down on the black oil sunflower seed.

Two finches feeding,

unaware of the impact

of their presence.

Posted with Blogsy

January 27: A little heat

After a weekend spent largely outside--shorefront birding and protesting on the streets of Portland yesterday and birding some more on wind-swept Scarborough Marsh this morning--I arrived home tonight feeling permanently chilled to the bone, muscles sore from being tensed for so long against the cold. Flannel pajamas and a heavy sweater are helping to finally warm my core, but the best moment of the evening so far has been washing some dishes, immersing my hands in that hot, soapy water. Perhaps a bath will follow dinner.

Washing dishes,
rough hands in hot water,
I sigh deeply.

January 26: Roadside hawks

With the hard crusty snow making it a challenge for birds of prey to hunt for rodents, more hawks and owls are visible perched in trees along road edges, watching for birds and rodents to emerge on the open edges. As I drove to Portland yesterday to join the tar sands oil pipeline protest, I counted two perched red-tails and one in flight being harassed by crows. On the way back north later that afternoon, I first saw two red-tails together in one tree, then a Bald Eagle flew over the road behind a flock of ducks, and then two more perched red-tails.

 

Fields of frozen snow.

As I speed past, hungry hawks

eye the roadside.

Posted with Blogsy

January 25: Duck wing

We were gathered at the window observing robins and waxwings foraging in the berry bushes down by the river, excited to see signs of life and color on this bone-chillingly cold day. Groups of black ducks flew upriver as we watched, moving quickly in small flocks of four or five--dark ducks with pale wing linings. We kept expecting to see an eagle at some point following behind--the reason for their flight--but we never did. I happened to be following one duck with my binoculars when the light caught the speculum--that patch of color--on its wing: such an indescribable, vivid blue-green. A millisecond later the color disappeared with a wingbeat as the duck flew on.

Fast-flying duck flashes
a breath-taking green.
Don't get attached to things.

January 24: Another cold night

The temperature atop Mt. Washington yesterday, with wind chill, was -85 degrees. While my day began at a balmy -2, it only improved to 9 degrees by day's end. In the car headlights as I pulled into my driveway, I could see the rhododendron's leaves curled up in tight rolls against the cold, frozen fingers of green. And during those brief seconds as I ran between car and house, I could only pick out a couple of stars, as if they too were seeking refuge on this frigid night.

Even the waxing moon
shrinks from this cold
behind a veil of frost.

January 23: 0 Degrees

Yesterday it was so cold that my brain was frozen. So, no post. Today it's even colder, but somehow seeing this in my car this morning inspired me:

Zero degrees--
a single cold egg
in an owl's January nest.

January 21: Gulls at the dump

Spent a perfect morning birding with a friend at Reid State Park. Cold, but little wind, bright sun, blue skies, birds bobbing in the waves. I even saw a longed-for life bird, a Dovekie, actively feeding very close to shore.

But no day of birding is complete without a stop at the local dump. So after our beach outing, the natural next stop was the Bath Landfill--to study gulls, of course. Thanks to a couple of nearby eagles, the gulls were all aswirl. Watching hundreds of white birds circling en masse above my head was a truly mesmerizing experience, akin to watching a snow storm in car headlights. Look closely at this photo. At a cursory glance, it looks like empty blue sky, but see all those tiny white specks? Those are gulls!

A dump worker referred to them as "dump ducks" and probably thought we were crazy. But there's no better place to observe gulls. Despite the great numbers of birds, we only picked out two unusual gulls amid the swirling swarm: a Glaucous and an Iceland Gull, both white-winged species. But standing there watching all those moving, shifting birds, I felt a true awe--similar to the feeling of looking up at a night sky strewn with stars.

Mesmerized by gulls. Photo by Derek Lovitch.

Gulls at the dump--
surprised to feel such awe
while surrounded by trash.

January 20: Blown by the wind

A mound of twigs and leaves, perhaps a fallen squirrel's nest, sits on the snow in my neighbor's back yard. As I peer at it, trying to figure out exactly what it is, a large brown oak leaf skitters across the snow. The leaf pauses until the next gust. When I next look out, it's gone, blown in the river, undoubtedly on its way to being swept downstream.

Oak leaf blowing
across the snow.
Sometimes I feel like that.