Making Merry Memories

Even Jacob Marley can be coaxed to grin during the Christmas season.



Smiles can be found perched on an antique milk can.



It's not impossible to create merriment to brighten these days of icicles and a lesser sun.



Of course, merry memories begin with family and friends.

Hope your Christmas was merry and all good wishes for a Happy New Year!

Time To Find a Puddle of Sunshine

I love this turkey photo. Took it through a closed window. Captures this time of year.



It was dang cold in Ohio today. Even the chickadees are looking for a puddle of sunshine.

Wistful November. The Bare Bones of Life

Autumn Sunrise




Iron and Lace



Dad (far right) in whose honor I am donating monthly to The Wounded Warrior Project.

October Impression . . .

It's that sleepy time of year. Hudson dreaming of August chipmunk chases.

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By demand . . .

My hubby has insisted that I post a picture to replace my previous post.

Like Queen Elizabeth in the movie Shakespeare in Love - he's requested something 'lighter'.

I think this picture suffices.

Lighter than air.

Sweet Katie on Grandma and Grandpa's swing.

Is it just me . .?

. . . or has something happened - something seriously troubling - to the culture?

Gentle reader. The question is really rhetorical. Your experience of the current culture is warmly welcomed. But having been absent from your blogs, I've developed a well-earned sense of unworthiness that requires that any silliness or occasional seriousness that floats to the surface here . . . anticipates only that it records one aging woman's momentary musings. Don't feel compelled to comment.

I know that we can agree that it's an interesting, crazy, confusing world.

Recently someone advised that one must hope to age 'gracefully'. I considered this advice. My response. Good luck with that.

Given the human condition it occurs to me that only a well-exercised sense of humor is of real value in facing the rigors of decline.

Humor, and of course, the happy associations of good friends and family.

The gal pictured above and a group of similarly clad women whose license plate you see - were all recorded during one morning. They were miles apart.

Humor, my friends. If you don't laugh you may find yourself crying.

It's been a good summer :0)

To any lost soul that wanders in here by accident or out of nostalgia for what once was, hello dear fellow-traveler.


Time is flying. Perhaps it's my aging brain. Perhaps the flood of this world's events and their coverage.

But time does fly.

On the occasion pictured above, time stopped. It's been a dream of mine. To feel the little life vibrations of a chickadee. To feel little bird tremors on my head, to see little bird toes grasping the brim of my hat.

I hope a dream or two of yours has been realized this summer. There's still time, though its pace has accelerated. All the more reason to keep looking up, out and around, for after all . . .

it's a beautiful world.

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A Mossy Mouthful

Sometimes a picture deserves its very own post. While trying to photograph a blue jay through my back porch window I saw this little fella scratching around in the fern bed just outside. I didn't realize that a titmouse feathered its bed with moss. Pretty sweet.



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Curiosity

Can't quite explain why I found this vignette so touching. The swan is a year old this spring. He's starting to spend less time around his watchful parents - an adolescent thing.

But I never expected this in a swan. I watched him circling beneath a tree. My binoculars revealed the cause. A Kingfisher sat in the branches above him. The young swan was curious. Imagine that. In this new heart under those white feathers. Wonder. About his world.


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Hey! Get outta there!

So I'm trying to back out of the driveway using my Honda's video screen. (It really is a help if you've got neck issues.) Bird migration is underway and I'm headed for the edge of Lake Erie early in the morning.

I put the car in reverse and glance at the camera image being transmitted from my rear bumper.

Yikes!!! There's some kid standing splayed-leg on the sidewalk behind me with his arms thrust out as if to impede my motion.

I can't believe my eyes! I throw the car in park and step out. No kid. OK. I'm losing it. Back in the car. The kid rematerializes. Sweet Mary.



Long story short. The image I see in the screen and the image I get outside the car are different because the camera is not dead-center on the car, but off to the side. (or something!)

For some reason that tree shadow morphs into a bratty kid for the camera. A cartoon kid, but geeze - he even throws a shadow. I know, any reasonable person can see it ain't human, but still - it's a little creepy don't you agree?

Lucky, lucky, lucky . . .

(morel mushrooms/heaven-on-earth)



Interrupted Fern


Sprouting Grass Moon(aka Full Pink Moon)






. . .Lucky to be gathering spring delights with all our senses.

The experience of long winter nights makes it all the lovelier.

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Just Gold and Flickers . .

Let's take a closer look . .

She's sweet . .(no mustache)




And now for some Flicker gold . . . (don't often get a shot like this!)




Gold!

You know, but just in case: Yellow-shafted Flicker


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Toad Soup

The American toad is celebrating spring in the pond at TBC. Busy trying to capture toad anatomy, I almost missed the picture of another spring phenomenon - a youngster's curiosity. I later learned this young man's name - Ivan. I suppose the toad was afraid he might get 'terrible' treatment, but they parted company as friends. Ivan clambored back into spring exploration and the toad hopped back into a soup of trilling DNA.

April 2006 Who? Me?! (Four Years Later)

Here's what I posted four years ago this month:

I almost deleted the message on the answering machine as I didn't recognize the caller's name at the beginning of the call. Incredulity followed as someone from the Heritage House Museum in Key West, Florida informed me that my poem, "Pruning", was being awarded 3rd prize in the 2006 Robert Frost Poetry Contest. Please indulge my public exaltation. For this small-town kid, one of seven children and a lackluster student - this is a rather big day.

And so . .

. . here we are four years later and I'd like to report (but can't) that I've written more award winning poetry and the great American novel.

I'm afraid I'm quite content to rest on my laurels (given no choice ;0) .

So for the next several days I'll be preening contentedly - remembering that brief moment of exhilaration and trying not to remember my way-too-vainglorious response. Only human, folks. Flawed and human - the awareness of which - inspired this (ahem) award-winning poem:

Pruning

Pruning is such a delicate matter
as we choose what must relinquish the right
to remain aloft and cling to the ladder
of the arbor where the squabbling jays natter
about their perches for the night.

It’s the space you cleave between the branch
and the trellised bark - you know will bleed.
You watch your questioning knuckles blanch
with the hope you’ve measured beyond mere chance
as required by the gardener’s creed
in the dog-eared books which try to say
about the choices a man must make
as to what must go and what may stay,
to love the light for another day.

The pruner knows his hands’ mistake
will leave the roots beneath his job
making their peace with the fool in the air,
judging his work while his temples throb,
as he stifles regret, with a tight-throated sob,
over the error for the things in his care.




Catherine Wilson 2006

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You Turkeys . . .

. . . are so cute!










We've never seen this before. Or heard it so close to home. The male turkey is smitten and follows her everywhere with his worrisome pleading. Gobblegobblegobble on and on - into the night as he follows her across hill and dale and across our porch.

These are wild. Apparently a hybrid between domestic and wild turkey. They're a hoot. Or should I say - a gobble.

My video of Courting Turkeys:

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EEEK!! (OR) . . . .

. .things that showed up on my external hard drive after my computer crashed.

I now use Carbonite, but I have thanked my hubby and son a gazzillion times for instructing me on backing up my files.

I feared I'd lost this dear little bold jumping spider. He's baaaaacck ;-)




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Drifting . . .

Ahhhh . . . much better now. It's good to drift away from those rather dark reflections in "Orphaned Blog."

Ahhhhh . . . this is much better.

Hope you're all drifting along smoothly with the spring intoxication.



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Spring Air

Took this yesterday. It's the same tree as I used for my poem years ago.


I still love this little ditty. No profundity here . . just plain unbridled delight.


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Orphaned Blog. The Comment I Didn't Leave

Update II: Tammy is alive. She left a comment on Pam's blog. I know her heart is breaking. She had traveled to be with Pam a couple years ago. They referred to themselves as Batman and Robin.

UPDATE I
I am shaken. My fellow blogger Anvil Cloud left a note to check on Pam's blog. It seems she died mere hours after I posted this piece late on the evening of April 3rd. That evening I had felt compelled to express a feeling that her blog had been orphaned. So after more than a year . ..

This is what I found tonight:


Tuesday, April 06, 2010
In Loving Memory
Pam Antonivich
8/10/1942- 4/4/2010
"I have ALS, it does not have me
Art does."
-Pam 2009-
She was a very brave woman
Who will be greatly missed
And was loved by many

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Here is the post I wrote as Pam was very near death:
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Gentle reader. Your life is in throttle-up mode today as spring is pumping energy and life into your routine. This post is an autumn plaint, not a vernal paean to love, but I wonder if you will find it relevant to your involvement in this community we create in cyberspace.
Last night I almost left this comment in Pam's blog, "Mind Trips." Almost. I'm certain she is dead. Almost certain. And it is that uncertainty which I address below:

The following is the comment I didn't leave. What if somehow Pam still accesses her blog and found my dark ponderings. Unthinkable. So this is a comment that will never be posted.
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Perhaps this isn't the place for expressing the thoughts that I'm having this evening, but it's been more than a year since we've heard from Pam and six months since her friend Tammy has posted. Both suffered from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, and knowing what I know from a family experience with ALS, my sad conclusion is that they are gone.

We are enlarged by the exchanges with others we've met through blogging. We lean over one another's cyber shoulder and give encouragement and praise and share our wonder and amusement about the journey through this challenging life and fascinating universe.

We celebrate, laugh, strut, worry and rant. We share a little of our unique corner of the world with people whose welcoming porches become as familiar and comfortable as a neighbor's, maybe more so given the anonymity of some communities today.

So perhaps someone will come up with a phrase or word to describe the feeling of returning to a blog like Pam's - her strong personality, her courage, her talent, her portraits of her family, the stories about her friends and baby kitten - as fresh as the day she hit the word 'publish' for the last time - and find her missing.

What words to describe the feeling that we've entered a home where everything is in order, but eerily vacant? The lights still glow, the pictures smile from the walls, the coffee pot is warm, but the owner has left. No note is on the counter, the door is still ajar, the birds come to the feeders, but no one is home.

So we return occasionally to peer in the windows for signs of life. We turn away, but pause to slip a note under the door mat with a scribbled hug and our email address, hoping a house-sitter will find it and allay our worry or confirm our suspicions.

The pixels shine as brightly. Pam's slideshow spins in the sidebar. One of my photos is captured there in the amazing art she created on her computer.

Tammy's picture shines from the comment queue above the keyboard where I drop these words into a blank space. I'm aware of her eyes as I scatter letters across the screen. It's as though she is watching.

The sad fact of this unaddressed flaw of the internet community is revealed in instances like Pam's, where we are left with no closure - only the pitiable, haunting flicker of her orphaned blog.

There are no customs to manage this grief. No one to address our consternation as to why the family has not put a mourning wreath on the door, left instructions as to where sympathy notes might be sent or merely typed one line stating the date of her passing.

I have a friend whose mother died three years ago. Recently she told me that she's left her clothes hanging in the closet just as her mother left them in the vacant little house outside of town.

Too painful to face. Too painful to empty the closet and walk away, or in Pam's family's case, too painful to enter this blog house where Pam still smiles amid her hopes and dreams.

Is it our business? Do we have a right to bristle with frustration at the void, at the unanswered questions? My answer is yes.

Because, finally, we did care. Through this imperfect medium, in this imperfect world, we reached across the physical boundaries of our short lives and hers and created a neighborhood of the heart.
She was one of us.

She was our friend with ALS, the disease that I never told her took my father in nine short months. We cheered her on as her life was extended with drugs, therapy, and loving care-takers, though we knew as surely as she did, that her courage could only sustain her warrior's heart a while longer.

With her unacknowledged passing, one of the homes on the block has been abandoned. The lights come on at night. The dog still sits by door. But no one's home.

The weeds will never grow here. The paint will never chip.

And there is the heavy irony in the title of Pam's last post:

"Still Standing."

What new turn of phrase can address this new phenomenon of the orphaned blog?

Perhaps the question is the answer.

On this spring day, I'm giving my family instructions as to how to manage my "Looking Up" when I die or become unable to care for my little house on the cyber neighborhood block.

Better yet, like a pre-planned funeral, perhaps we should write our own sign-off that some survivor could merely find in the draft drawer and put it out there, beneath the welcome mat, so that visitors could leave a little note in the mail box, gently pat the newel post, and walk away without feeling a uneasy sense that they've abandoned an old friend that just couldn't get to the door.

Rest in peace my friend, my lost neighbor.

Love,

Cathy Wilson

April 3, 2010
mushduckATyahooDOTcom

Into The Spring Woods . . .

With Jonna and Hudson the terrier.

We weren't alone. Mr.Snapping Turtle didn't budge.

The eyes said it all . . .







" I'm tired of cold mud.

This light, this moss,

this log, this frog song are mine.

Move along."

We did.


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