unharvested

It's been a beautiful autumn, brisk and crisp, leaves from green to gold, scarlet, orange, bronze, glowing yellow. The windows are open and I'm taking long walks and trying to savor, store it up for bleaker days.  I've discovered pink lady apples, (they've edged out honeycrisps as my favorite) and beautiful sunsets from my studio windows: fat pink clouds and streaks of gold over the old mill town of Lowell.

I've been culling my books, pruning, paring, streamlining, saving only the ones who touch my heart.

The rest go to More Than Words  a used books store that trains teens in foster care: "Empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business."

You know when you go into someone's house and look at their books, you get to know them? Here are most of my surviving A, B, and start of the C (by author) novels, those that aren't scattered elsewhere or in the country. It's scary how few there are, but it feels good too, that I've passed along the ones I'm pretty sure I won't read again, stripped down to the necessities.

"May something always go unharvested!
 May much stay out of our stated plan,
 Apples or something forgotten and left,
 So smelling their sweetness would be no theft."

from Unharvested, by Robert Frost

gathering

I collected a basket of lichen, moss, and birch bark for a future project.

Maybe I'll arrange little deer in it for a personal portable forest,

or make a diorama like the shoebox ones we made in grade school.

I'd like to make some crazy outsider art version of a diorama. And...

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over...

... I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

                                   from Birches, by Robert Frost

strange and beautiful

This is my eighth winter in New England, eleventh in the Catskills and we usually have tons of snow by now. Not this year. Not yet. And I don't miss it a bit. Digging out the car and the driveway, slipping on ice--the day to day of long winters is tedious. So I am enjoying it while it lasts. 

There were fine icicle formations in the Catskills Christmas weekend.

Usually by now the waterfall is frozen. At Christmas there were icicles behind it and along side, but it was roaring along, fueled by snowmelt from higher elevations. It's going down to 0 degrees tonight. I have a feeling next time I go it will be fully frozen.

It was odd to see icicles alongside green ferns. For some reason it made me think about Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea, which I read last summer. This beautiful passage is from the opening:

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded and then returned. For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same. Not only do the tides advance and retreat in their eternal rhythms, but the level of the sea itself is never at rest. It rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow, as the floor of the deep ocean basins shifts under its increasing load of sediments, or as the earth's crust along the continental margins warps up or down in adjustment to strain and tension. Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.

I was especially interested in ice formations on the ground. I imagine they form, then partially melt, then reform.

Clusters of ice, rocks and moss. Strange and beautiful.

I'm toying with the idea of starting a nature book group one evening a month at the store. It's an area I am well-read in, and there are so many wonderful books, essays and poems available. I put out free (public domain) poems that I've made copies of, in the store, and am pleasantly surprised at how many people take them.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

                                                               -Robert Frost

A convergence of snow, berries, branches and ferns.

poetry

Last winter I printed a short poem by Robert Frost on textured paper and put a small stack out in the store with a note: a poem for you. Later I inserted the word free, because it is a store after all.

      Dust of Snow

    
    The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

                                                                     

I was surprised and pleased that a fair number of the poems were taken, and that a few people even came to talk to me about poetry. So next weekend I'm going to take another poem.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

                                                                         - W.B. Yeats

Do you have a favorite poem?

Jen