Joyride

Joyride

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I waited a while to read Susan Orlean’s memoir Joyride, waited for it to become available through my library’s holds queue. I think Orlean would approve of this, even though reading a library copy meant I didn’t buy one of my own.

“A library isn’t merely a municipal building, although it is that, too, and it isn’t merely a valuable resource for books, although it is certainly that as well. Libraries are something more than that,” Orlean says in Joyride, describing the process of writing The Library Book (which I read and loved), “something essential and emotional, the public soul. Maybe we recognize ourselves in them.”

I recognized myself in Joyride. Not that my writing career has been anything like Orlean’s, but her reasons for writing closely resemble my own: “Writing things down always felt natural to me, as if it completed the electrical circuit of a thought. A thought didn’t quite exist unless I put it on the page.”

This is why I’ve been keeping a journal since high school, why I started this blog in 2010 and am at it still. Stories are “documents of our humanity,” Orlean writes, “shimmering trails of time spent alive.”

March!

March!

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March has never been my favorite month. I can think of at least one occasion, early in this blog’s history, when I slandered it mightily, and I’m sure there are others.

March is fickle, March is erratic. You can’t count on March for much of anything …. except variety.

So why have I, lover of variety and change and novelty, turned my back on this month? Because it can be the dregs of winter and only a tease of spring, for starters. I’ve had my reasons and they’ve been good ones.

But after decades of living in Virginia, I’ve come to terms with March. The climate has warmed and flowers and trees bloom for most of the month. Forsythia, cherries, Bradford pears, flowering quince, snow drops, daffodils, hyacinths, and sometimes, as we close in toward April, the first violets.

Yesterday I walked the Turquoise Trail, and thought about this month, the only one named for a walking step. That alone is reason to celebrate. So here, on the twenty-sixth day of thirty-one, I raise my glass, my cup of tea, to March.

Patterns and Repeats

Patterns and Repeats

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Last night I stood outside while my grandchildren played with the neighbor kids, rode bicycles and scooters, shed jackets in the early evening chill. A timeless ritual they don’t yet know is timeless.

I saw in them my own dear girls, their tangles and pigtails, trikes and tractors. And deeper still, my own young self, playing Red Light, Green Light in the warm Kentucky dusk.

If we’re lucky enough to live a while, we see the patterns and repeats. Timeless activities are blessed by repetition. We find meaning in their concentric circles.

The Place of Tides

The Place of Tides

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Enough weather posts for a while. I’ve read some great books lately. One of them is James Rebanks The Place of Tides.

My first Rebanks read was The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, a paean to the placed life. Rebank’s family has been raising sheep on the same parcel of Cumbrian land for six centuries, and he uses this deep attachment to muse on the importance of rootedness. Like my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, Rebanks is both a farmer and a writer. One role sustains the other.

Rebanks expands his horizons in his most recent book The Place of Tides, which chronicles the work of Anna, a Norwegian “duck woman” who preserves the ancient tradition of housing eider ducks on remote islands near the Arctic Circle. After spending a season with Anna, Rebanks writes, “a new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.”

Rebanks admires Anna’s fierceness, her devotion to the eider ducks and the ducks’ trust in her. Anna’s efforts are keeping a tradition alive. In Anna, Rebanks finds a way out of his own confusion and doubt.

“Anna asked me if I would write a book about her and what kind of book it would be. I answered that I wasn’t sure, but that if I did, I would write about her work, her island, her family’s story, and her own life. I told her I could never know the whole of her, another human entirely, a woman, and someone from another culture to my own — such a thing was probably impossible, but if I did write an account, I would try to make it as true as I could. I explained that I was trying to see the world through her eyes. I would probably try to make of her life a kind of fable. I asked if that would be OK, and she said yes.

I am only the storyteller. She is the story.”

(The North Sea viewed from the Orkney Islands, about 350 miles from Anna’s home on the west coast of Norway.)

The Survivors

The Survivors

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The weeping cherry has grown taller this year. I notice its height as it blooms in the very lightest of pinks. It wouldn’t be here if Tom hadn’t cabled it back to life after the big storm of 2018, the fierce winds that toppled two giant oaks and pancaked the trampoline.

When I look at the backyard now, I see the survivors: the poplar, the sassafras, the witch hazel. I try to forget the stumps, the ghost trees, the ones I see only in memory.

The survivors are what count. They have beaten the odds. Soon their leaves will unfurl to create the canopy that shades us all summer long. Their trunks will support the hammock that lulls me to sleep on warm, drowsy afternoons.

But these scenes are yet to be. All I can say now is that these trees have survived the winter. We all have.

Just in Time

Just in Time

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Spring arrives at 10:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Today we’ll have more than 12 hours of daylight. It’s the vernal equinox, when I always think of Dad.

Today we’ll have more light than darkness, more warmth than cold. Today we’ll say goodbye to snowcrete and the Polar Vortex.

Just in time, I can stop wearing gloves, which I donned as recently as a few days ago. Just in time, I can turn my face to the sky (slathered with SPF 50, of course).

“Just in time” implies that I would explode or something if we had to endure more winter weather. And of course, I would not. I would put my head down and keep going.

Nevertheless, it’s been a long, cold winter. At times this season it’s seemed like winter would never end. But today, at least meteorologically, it has. And just in time.

The Redder the Better

The Redder the Better

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We are flush with cardinals here in my corner of Virginia, but the male at the feeder yesterday was one of the most vibrant I’ve ever seen. He practically glowed.

I did a little research, and sure enough, male cardinals are at their most vivid in late winter and early spring. Diet determines color, and females want a partner with a seed stash. The redder, the better.

You might wonder how such an outlandishly bright bird manages to be one of the longest lived, up to 15 years old in some cases. Male cardinals certainly aren’t hiding from predators.

The answer, according to the Cornell Bird Lab, is that cardinals avoid the stress of migration, and staying put gives them a longer breeding season. They are “habitat generalists” who can nest in a variety of locations, and the females of the species are far less conspicuous than their mates. They camouflage themselves in tangled shrubs (of which we have plenty).

It’s easy to be ho-hum about cardinals, given how many we have. But their springtime brilliance reminds me how lucky we are to have them in our midst.

(I snapped this photo during a late-winter snowstorm several years ago. This fellow was already an eye-popping scarlet.)

The Piano’s Lesson

The Piano’s Lesson

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My piano and I are simpatico. When I don’t play, it glowers; when I do, it shines.

Proof of our being in sync: I had no sooner stocked up on distilled water than I noticed the flashing light that tells me when the piano’s humidifier needs filling.

The piano has made me more aware of indoor humidity or lack thereof. Of outdoor humidity I need no reminders. I live in a region of high stickiness and temper my warm-weather activities accordingly.

But the dry air that keeps my tresses from frizzing is not good for my favorite instrument. The piano thrives in a moist environment. Which means I probably do, too.

Slipping in a Walk

Slipping in a Walk

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Schools dismissed early. County courts closed. Yet the feared tornados did not arrive. A little after 7 p.m. I slipped outside for a post-dinner walk, making my way through the humid dusk.

The storm warning had ended and a high-wind warning had yet to begin. The jets were not yet flying low over the neighborhood. I could hear the owls hooting in the woods, could see the yellow glow of lamplight from houses across the street.

It felt like an achievement, getting outside on this wild weather day. It felt like I had accomplished something. The most elemental of all accomplishments — moving through space — but sometimes, that’s enough.

(No rainbow last night, but the day before St. Patty’s Day, you’d better believe I was looking for one.)

One Oscar After Another

One Oscar After Another

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I title my post in homage to this year’s winner, even though I was hoping this year’s winner wouldn’t win.

I preferred “Hamnet” of the films I’d seen … but knew it wouldn’t prevail. I’m glad its leading lady took home an Oscar, though. To watch Jesse Buckley’s performance as Shakespeare’s wife, to see the emotions of love and grief and wonder pass across her face, was a master class in acting.

Which is not to say that “One Battle After Another” didn’t include some fine performances, too. It was the overall feel of the movie that left me cold.

But you do not come here for movie critiques, dear reader, so I will close by saying that the 98th Academy Awards presentation was brisker than many; it ended by 10:30 p.m. And since I have sat through the reception of countless Oscars after another (seldom skipping the program), I’m celebrating the pre-midnight close of the show as much as anything else.