October 20: Long walk

Participated in Rotary's End Polio walk today, about six miles from Lincolnville Beach into downtown Camden. This morning before we started out, torrential rain--but it stopped before we began the walk, so we were just fogged in. As the walkers spread out, the ones up ahead were almost invisible in the mist. Then the fog became more, well, precipitous. It began raining again, though fortunately just a constant drizzle, not like this morning's downpour. And at least it was relatively warm. The constant motion helped too. By the time we finished up, I felt pleasantly invigorated. The rain on my face, the camaraderie of a shared cause, the bright, wet foliage we'd passed by, the tingling in my leg muscles--after being sick for four days, I needed that. 

She should have known
not to wear mascara
for a long walk in the rain.

(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this is not about myself but a friend I walked with, one of those women who won't appear in public without make-up on and who spent much of the walk wiping it off with her rain-soaked sleeve.)

October 19: Floating leaf

When I looked out the window first thing this morning, I noticed a red leaf paused in the air, floating against the white door of the shed. It took me a moment to realize that the leaf wasn't frozen in space or time, but caught in a spider web.

Red leaf stuck in a web.
My in-laws trapped a fox
in their backyard.

October 18: Carrying eggs

Feeling ill with an incipient cold, I went into work this morning only because I had to; the committee I co-chair was having its monthly meeting. But I fully intended to come home right after the meeting and go back to bed. Well, as things go, I felt a little better as the morning wore on and then got caught up in things, so I ended up working the whole day. Now that I'm home, however, the cold is catching up with me--sore throat, headache, achey joints. Whine and sniffle. It's just a cold, but some days the body just feels so over-sensitive, so fragile. I want to tell it to just toughen up already, a cold virus is nothing; does mind over matter ever work? Instead, I just take more cold meds and huddle on the couch.

A dozen fresh eggs.

I carry them gingerly,

aware of my own fragile shell.

October 17: Quarry

This morning I participated in a Land Trust outing at the Simonton Quarry Preserve in Rockport. This property is currently owned by the Nature Conservancy, but we've managed it for many years. Still, this was my first visit, in part because quarries give me the creeps. Those impenetrable black depths... given all the junk that gets left on the property in plain sight, who knows what might be down there in that water, or how deep? Today our findings were innocuous--beer bottles and a big TV face-down in cattails, dumped off the back wall of the first quarry.

Walking around the edges of the quarries was sometimes challenging, and I felt an irrational fear that I was going to trip on something I couldn't see, fall from atop one of the sheer cliff walls of this depthless crater, and end up in that cold, dark water. But that didn't stop me from scrambling up the rocks with the others to get a sense of these strange, man-made water bodies, which twisted back into the woods beyond our sight.

The quarries are a historic remnant of Rockport's past as a center for lime production. Limestone was quarried and then shipped by train to the big kilns on the waterfront. We found abutments of cut stone and old cement pads where machinery had once poised. Across the road from the quarries, flanking Goose River, several tailings piles cobbled the woods with randomly strewn, sharp-angled, loose rocks that were a challenge to walk over.

Amid the awkward human landscape, spots of wild beauty: bright green foliose lichen growing like an arboreal lettuce patch on some tree trunks, twisted old apple trees, little ruby-crowned kinglet acrobatically exploring a birch tree, great blue heron flying down river. Climbing atop the highest tailings pile afforded a great view of nearby farm fields and fall-tinged trees along the river. And the others in the group spotted a fish in one of the quarries, which I was intrigued by. How did it get there? Were there others, or was it alone in that vast, carved stone bucket of black water?

Yellow leaves floating
on water the deep black
of dilated pupils.

October 16: Last light

At day's end the sun finally appeared long enough to cast its golden, dying light onto the west-facing slope of Mount Battie. Scraps of blue sky appeared, orange leaves began to shine. And a cardinal chipped and chipped from somewhere out of sight, shy bird, no doubt pecking at bird seed on the ground below the bird feeders.

Cardinal's chip intensifies
as the day's last glow
fades from the mountainside.

October 15: Spray of sparrows

Sparrows still linger in the fields and along the roadside. As I was driving today, sparrows scattered on either side of my car, their plumage blending perfectly with the sepias, ochres, and umbers of the weedy verge. They're subtly gathering the season's last fruits, the seeds of withering grasses and wildflowers. How close, this time of year, the convergence of beauty and mortality.  

As my car passes, 

spray of late-season sparrows. 

A friend's mother has died.

October 14: Lost in a book

Spent a good part of this rainy day reading a novel, a murder mystery by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø, one of my favorites. Without giving anything away, I can say it's one of the more devastating books that I've read recently. So it was with some relief that when I finished this tragic book, set in the darker corners of chilly Oslo, the view out the window somewhat eased my mind: maple leaves edged with orange, back lawn a mosaic of colorful leaves across which a fat squirrel carries an acorn, and the river smoothly flowing past.

Hunter's orange leaves
offset the bleakness
of rain-soaked trunks.

October 13: Caterpillar

This morning I went for my first run in at least six months. You could hardly call it a run, given that I moved very slowly for a very short distance. But I wore my new running shoes, the expensive ones my physical therapist encouraged me to buy as incentive to start running again, and I didn't overdo it. It's very hard for me to begin at Square One all over again with an activity I used to be really good at; I don't have a lot of patience for what will probably be months of rebuilding my strength and lung capacity. But forcing myself to take it easy gave me the opportunity to focus on what was going on around me: red squirrel scolding in the woods along the river, robins feeding in a crabapple, a squash garden killed by last night's frost, the perfect cloudlessness of the blue sky on this crisp fall day.

Didn't step on
the caterpillar in the road.
Thought it was a turd.

October 12: Freeze warning

The National Weather Alert for tonight is for temperatures below freezing. It is mid-October, after all, so this is to be expected. But that chilly blast every time someone opens the front door reminds me how, even though I love living in a boreal habitat, with its mountains, spruces, and warblers, I really don't enjoy the cold.

Tonight my husband, whom I haven't seen much of lately, and I are going out to dinner at Primo, probably our favorite restaurant in Maine. My hope is that the calorie intake from tonight's meal--and resulting added fat cells--will compensate for the inverse drop in air temperature. I'm working on my own personal insulation layer.

Today at the feeders a big flurry of birds--chickadees, titmice, house finches--chowed down sunflower seeds as if, aware of the imminent cold snap, they wanted to stuff in as much as they could to help them survive the cold, dark night. Calories can mean life or death when you're a bird.

To eat like a bird
is not always
a dainty thing.

October 11: Hard rain

Last night's storm began with such a loud rumble of thunder that I actually opened the front door in alarm, thinking that maybe a landslide was rolling down the side of Mount Battie. Then I kept the (inside) door open so that the cat and I could both watch, fascinated, the torrential downpour that seemed to instantly fill the streets with rushing rivers of rain. Rain roared on the roof, slackened, then pounded some more, its drama providing a recurring frisson throughout the evening.

Streets washed clean--
catharsis, after
rainstorm's violence.

October 10: Toast

Home alone, making toast for dinner. Sometimes just a little thing will send me back to childhood...

My grandmother used to
cut my buttered toast
into "soldiers."