December 20: Snow Snakes

This morning I drove to a friend's house as the snow started to fall amid gusty winds. The swirls of snow atop dry pavement were like the mesmerizing S patterns snakes make sliding through sand. Driving home several hours later, after an inch or so of snow had made the roads rather slick, I thought of those "snow snakes" I had seen earlier. Snakes are beautiful creatures, but some can be deadly. And so it is with snow. Watching the flakes fall this morning gave me happy thoughts of a white Christmas; creeping home this afternoon, I was anxiously reminded of the couple of times I slid off the road last winter.

Snow slithers in wind
side-winding into slick drifts--
dangerous beauty.

December 19: Christmas Bird Count

The annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is one of those holiday season traditions that I always look forward to. The basic premise is this: a fixed Count Circle with a 15-mile radius has been divided into territories, or sections; we spend the entire designated day counting every bird we see in our section. Not just how many species we see, but every individual bird we see. All day. It's a long one, especially when temperatures are low.

The Christmas Bird Count, which has been going on for over 100 years, originated as an alternative to the Christmas "Side Hunts" in which men would compete to see who could shoot the most birds. Done in the same place at the same time over a number of years, the CBC reveals trends in bird populations. You can read more about it on the Audubon website. My husband and I have personally been involved with the local Thomaston-Rockland Count for over 15 years, and have been leading "our" section for about half that time. This morning we were joined by several birder friends who were kind enough to brave the cold to help us count. We began the day with a fly-by pair of ravens. Louisa Gerstenberger's sharp eyes found an eagle perched in a tree; later we enjoyed watching it fly over the breakwater. This was the only ocean in our section, so we spent the longest time here, trying to rack up ducks, geese, grebes, and loons. The breakwater itself was covered with a thin coating of salty ice, and scattered with gull-pecked sea urchin bodies. Usually we see purple sandpipers on the seaward side of this jetty, but not today, despite walking its length, with care, two different times.

After lunch, my husband and I were on our own in tackling the most challenging part of our section, a strange no-man's-land in Rockland's hinterlands, a marshy valley bounded by several old limestone quarries that, despite being across the street from the city dump, has also become a local dumping grounds. This year we came upon the remains of a moose head. Some years it's discarded appliances or a bag of deer guts, and always lots of beer bottles. This year, a moose head. We were also fortunate enough to come upon a flock of cedar waxwings, one of my favorite birds, as well as a group of 6 cardinals, several red-tailed hawks flying over the fields, and some attractive sparrows.

By dark, we had racked up 34 species, 753 individuals. In a "good" year we get at least 40 species, but we aren't complaining. Our list includes 7 wild turkeys, 5 downy woodpeckers, 127 Canada geese, 57 crows, 101 herring gulls, 4 horned grebes, and 23 buffleheads. And we spent the whole of a sunny winter day outside, looking for birds with good friends in this beautiful area we call home. That's the kind of holiday tradition I like to keep.

We saw 36 of these guys, including this one. Photo by Brian Willson.

Raven: two; Loon: four--

ritual of the Bird Count.

But who can count joy?

December 18: Sky

I suffer from insomnia, and my patient husband helps me fall asleep every night by reading to me. Over the years, he has read me J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (and The Hobbit), twice, all the works of Jane Austen (he's read Pride and Prejudice, my favorite, three times), Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series, twice, all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. He's currently reading me Tolstoy's War and Peace...


...which explains why today, when gazing out my window at the incredible, clear blue sky in a sort of distracted rapture, a particularly memorable passage from War and Peace came to mind. Prince Andrei, one of the book's heroes, is wounded while fighting in the Battle of Austerlitz. Formerly a rather stuck-up, proud man, the following experience of enlightenment eventually changes him for the better. 
"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky--the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrei. "Not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!..." (Book 3, Chapter XVI). 


Amid war, he finds peace. A perfect sky such as today's uplifts my spirits, puts things in perspective. Whatever is going on below--the ant-like toils of humans upon the planet--the implacable blue face of the shining sky overarches it all. Even when clouds obscure this brilliance, we know from airplane travel that if you rise high enough above them, the sun shines and the sky is wide-open, infinite, blending into the cosmos. 


Walk outside. Look up.
Sky gods don their blue silk capes,
dazzle us mortals.

December 17: Sirius

The night sky has been crystal clear the past few days, but the cloud-free sky has exposed us to winter's frigid blast. Not a good time for star-gazing. But tonight I couldn't help but notice (from the comfort of my car) our brightest star Sirius rising above the western horizon. 

The facts: Sirius, alpha star in the constellation Canis Major (Big Dog) is also known as the Dog Star. This white binary star fairly close to us in relative astronomical terms--less than 9 light years away--has a magnitude, or brightness, of -1.43. The lower the number, the brighter the star--the sun, by comparison, is -27. That it's a binary--or double--star means two stars contribute to its light. And the fact that it's so bright, so obvious in the sky, brings it easily to our attention, as well as to that of star watchers throughout human history. 

In Greek mythology, Canis Major and its companion constellation Canis Minor are the hunting dogs of Orion, a familiar constellation to most. When Orion rises in the winter sky, Sirius can be found below his left leg. Sirius, Procyon--the bright star of Canis Minor--and Betelgeuse--the red giant that forms Orion's left shoulder--form "the winter triangle." 

While I always think of Sirius as a winter star, it was revered in Egypt over 5,000 years ago as a symbol of the Summer Solstice. Egyptians represented it with a hieroglyph of a dog, and the star was associated with the Nile and its annual inundation. The Greeks believed that the Dog Star produced the heat of summer, a sultry period we still refer to as the Dog Days. Other ancient cultures thought of Sirius as a dog, too, often the dog of the sun. But right now in New England, Sirius is the dog of very cold nights--three-dog nights, perhaps, when you want three dogs in your bed to keep you warm. 

Interestingly, even the Cherokees thought of Sirius as a dog star--one of the two dog guides guarding the ends of the path of souls. The other star, Antares, is only visible in summer, so the two stars aren't in the sky at the same time. When encountered on the trail, each gatekeeper dog had to be given food before the soul would be allowed to continue its progress to the afterlife.

What must we do to appease the Dog Star of the Sun and perhaps gain a few degrees of warmth back into our life? Do the rising offerings of our wood smoke help? What about the harbor, offering up its own sea smoke this morning? Or the songs of coyotes in the winter woods?

Bright star of winter

shining with cold, remote light--

a sled dog's pale eye.

December 16: Cold

With wind chill right now it's about 10 degrees outside. As we say here in Maine, it's colder than a witch's tit in January. From the comfort of my desk, I'm watching the wind whip bare branches into a frenzy. The darkened sky is sharp and clear, with a cutting edge of blue steel.

Yes, I'll freely admit it, I'm a wimp about the cold. Despite being a Maine native, I always have been, and I've gotten worse since I've gotten older. In college I used to ski frequently. I'd backpack in the winter, sleep in the snow, and not think anything of it. It was fun! Now, not so much. Now, I sit as close to the nearest heat source as possible, even co-opting the cat from my husband's lap if necessary. (She prefers his lap because, unlike me, he radiates heat like an oven.)

At work I have a space heater under my desk, the miraculous Vornado. And as I basked in its heat earlier today, I thought about what it must have been like in "the old days" in Maine when people lived in big drafty farm houses with a fireplace in every room and burned through 15 cords of wood every winter. I think about Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "The Long Winter," in which she describes running out of wood before winter's end and twisting hay into sticks to keep the fire going. They went to bed with hot potatoes and woke up with snow drifted on top of their quilts, nail heads frosty white in the walls next to their beds.

In Heian Era Japan, over 1,000 years ago, things were even worse, especially for women (isn't it always the case?) Their houses were open-plan wood structures divided into rooms by screens, with flimsy blinds over window and door openings. Aristocratic women were stuck in their rooms, ensconced behind screens; it was not proper to show your face or be seen by a male who was not your husband, father, or a child. For heat, all they had were charcoal braziers. Is it any wonder that the clothing fad was layers? Women would wear up to twelve layers of robes, the aesthetic appeal of which was judged--by other women, at least--on how well they matched the colors of their layers. Women of that era also blackened their teeth as part of their maquillage. And did I mention that they never cut their hair? So I picture a woman of that era behind her screen, dressed in so many robes that she can't move--which doesn't matter because she can't go anywhere anyway--long black hair trailing behind her onto the bare floor and her black teeth a contrast to her pale face, huddled over something looking like a patio hibachi with a few faintly glowing coals... Surely I need to stop whining about the cold and consider myself fortunate to live in this era of furnaces, air-tight wood stoves, Monitors, and Vornado space heaters.

Branches clack with cold,
chilly window panes shiver.
Curl up closer, cat.

December 15: Nature's Ornaments

As I was driving into town to run some errands, I noticed a tree that seemed to be well decorated with big, puffy brown Christmas ornaments. Wow, I thought, someone was very ambitious! As I was passing the tree, however, I realized with pleasant surprise that it was an hydrangea bush still bedecked with its lovely, lacy blossoms, now dried and preserved for the winter.

So then as I made my way through the side streets of Camden, I began to notice other trees also decorated by nature: an old oak with most of its leaves still hanging from the gnarled branches like little brown hands; a small magnolia with swollen leaf buds, perhaps spurred by the recent warmer weather; an apple glowing with an abundance of frozen, golden orbs of fruit; bright purple clusters of crabapples; a sumac's fuzzy red fruits rising above its bare, twisting branches.


They can't let go, was the thought that ran through my head. I'm always looking for metaphors, and they often end up reflecting my inner state of mind. (Funny how that works.) But that's not really it. These ornaments of nature are each worth hanging onto for their own reasons. The sumac, apple, and crabapple fruits, for example, will attract and feed wandering flocks of robins, bluebirds, and waxwings. Dependent on such winter gifts to survive, these beautiful birds will fill the trees like living ornaments--like some kind of divine visitation--eat all they can, and move on. So it's not about letting go. It's about flaunting what you've got, in your own way. It's about celebration.

Apples, dried blossoms--
wild holiday ornaments
for a wild season.

December 14: Sunrise

This morning the sun officially rose at 7:04 a.m. EST. Our house faces east, but because the craggy bulk of Mount Battie looms right out our front windows, we don't normally see the actual sun till a few hours after it comes up. So  I was surprised today to pull up the kitchen blind and get a face full of sunshine. There was the rising sun, peeking around the corner of Mount Battie. A rare sight, indeed, even if I were an early riser. With a week to go till the Winter Solstice, the sun tracks a low arc in the sky these days. We'll enjoy less than 9 hours of sun today. To counter any bleak thoughts of the diminishing light, a crisp blue sky offers a welcome change from last night's rain. Enjoy the light on your face while you can.

I learned from www.americancatholic.org that it's the saint day of St. John of the Cross, patron saint of mystics, about which Thomas Merton had this to say: "Just as we can never separate asceticism from mysticism, so in St. John of the Cross we find darkness and light, suffering and joy, sacrifice and love united together so closely that they seem at times to be identified."


Also, this quotation from John himself:

"Never was fount so clear,
undimmed and bright;
From it alone, I know proceeds all light
although 'tis night."

I'm not Catholic, although I'm married to one (which is one step closer to playing one on TV). But I welcome spiritual enlightenment and knowledge from all sources, including Catholic mystic poets. St. John of the Cross conveys so well the essence of this season, when we must learn to embrace both light and dark as the nights lengthen, sacrifices of all kinds--as well as love--as we plan for the holidays, and cold and warmth as we endure the variable weather.  He's speaking of the light of his Christian God, of course, but we may also read his words as referring to the sun, one of the original gods, the true center of our solar system from which "proceeds all light" even if our part of the planet doesn't happen to be facing it at just this moment. 


A week from Solstice.
Sun peeks around the mountain--
hopeful morning light.

December 13: The Long Read

I've spent most of today sitting on my couch wrapped in a sleeping bag, cat at my side, intensely reading a draft of a friend's novel. Now as darkness falls outside the window, and rain falls at Gillette Stadium on TV, I'm taking a breather, returned from another world to my own living room. I'm slightly dazed and wrung out, in that way a good book will leave you. There aren't many days, especially this time of year, when I get to indulge myself in the luxury of reading for this long a stretch.

A long day inside:
windows frame another world,
pages share one too.

December 12: Christmas Tree

Phew, what a day. My sister and my two nieces (Fiona: 3-1/2; Nola: almost 6 months) are staying nearby at my parents' for the weekend. Fiona wanted to spend time alone today with Auntie Kristen at her house. So she and I came back to the house and dressed up teddy bears, "wrote a letter" to Uncle Paul that involved using all the crayons, made candy cane cookies in a way that somehow involved the floor, had lunch, watched Christmas specials on t.v., and "helped" Uncle Paul put lights on the tree. Before we could decorate it, however, my sister showed up, and of course suddenly Fiona had a meltdown. Classic "Mommy's here" response after a day of being a perfect angel. (It doesn't help that she was up at 4 a.m. this morning.)

So my sister drove back to our parents' house with a crying Fiona, who of course immediately fell asleep in the car. After they left, Paul and I put on Christmas music  and hung ornaments on the tree ourselves. When we were done, our Sleeping Beauty cat momentarily woke up and came out to check the newest change to her territory. She seemed to approve. We always hang the non-fragile ornaments lowest in case she ever gets inspired to bat at an ornament or two like when she was younger.

With the fragrance of fir and the soft glow of lights filling our living room, stockings hung from the fireplace-less mantle, and the first round of Christmas cookies still warm in the kitchen, I'm in the holiday mood. Peace on earth, goodwill to man (and woman). Fa la la la la!


Fragrance of fir boughs,
lights twinkle in a dark room--
our faces, hearts, glow.

Update: shortly after completing this post, our Christmas tree spontaneously and unceremoniously took  a face plant on the living room rug. Fortunately only one ornament was broken, easily mended, and the tree is now positioned more securely in its stand. Ah, if only all holiday dramas could be this mild.

December 11: Wind

Funny how a lot of my posts lately have involved the weather. I guess that's life in Maine for you, especially this time of year. One day we have a huge storm; the next, sunshine sparkling on fresh-fallen snow. You can never really be sure of what you're doing a few days from now, because who really knows what kind of weather pattern will move in? They'll predict heavy snowfall, and then we'll get rain here on the coast. The forecast will be "all clear" for that drive south, and then you'll find yourself trying to make your way through blinding snow flurries.

Often when I wake up in the morning I think it's raining because the river is so loud. All that rushing water can make a roar. Today a combination of fast-moving high water and winds made me think some sort of tempest was raging outside. Despite sun and blue skies, wind chill definitely played in part in today's comfort level. I'm sure I'll have more branches to clear off the yard tomorrow.

A friend mentioned the wind in a very lyrical email today. (You can't communicate around here without the weather becoming part of the conversation.) She wrote: "Today is one of those days when I feel like a little speck on the surface of this immense planet with this powerful atmosphere swirling around me. Every time there's a big gust the dog makes a little tiny 'woof.' I agree." I especially loved the image of her dog barking at the wind gusts. So that inspired today's poem. (Thank you, Heidi.) 


Wind a strong presence.
Dog responds to the loud gusts
with a humble "woof."

December 10: Willow Wands

Yesterday's storm winds whipped tree branches all over our yard. The big willow next door, which already lost a big branch last winter, tossed little golden-barked wands all over the snowy front lawn.

Willows have always been associated with water. The weeping willow (often carved on old gravestones) makes us think of tears, of course, and willows generally live near water sources. This willow must have sucked up a lot of river water in its time (in addition to bursting our underground water pipe--but that's a story I'd rather not dwell on), so it carries a bit of the river's spirit in its veins. Despite several dams, the river is a wild thing, as is this willow, though planted many years ago by my neighbor.

So what to make of all these wands strewn across my lawn? What kind of magic do they possess? Was this some kind of throw-down by Old Man Willow? Or have they woven a protective spell on our little house? With wild magic, things can go either way.

Storm-strewn willow withes
weave their magic on my lawn,
wild as the river.