Recipe

this is a recipe a friend of my mother-in-law's gave her.  Spelling has not been corrected.

1 Carnation Instant Breakfast
1 2t Milk, 1 Egg, spoonful cooked cerial
2 Tblsp Brandy
1/2 Banana or any fruit you like

Put in blender or beat vigorously until liquidified.
Drink one glass three times a day.
This is equivalent (in nourishment) to three meals.

Time flies like a banana

There is a lot to be said for getting older.  One of the things that I tend to view positively is the way time just hurtles by.  Some days it's tomorrow before I even know it's today.  Some days it's next week.  I plan on putting the rest of the christmas lights away, if I ever get a chance, but at the rate things are going, I may have to dust them and put them back in the windows before that. 

One other nice thing is,  no matter how awful January almost was,  boy did it go fast.  February is the next speeding bullet we have to dodge, and after that, March, the Month of Many Blizzards.  Damn,  we're almost into April already. Wasnt that easy?

Upscale Shopping Adventures

Went to a grocery store Ive rarely bothered with before. This one  has a specialty cheese and wine section, the herbs are now by themselves on a huge rack nearby, (SIX kinds of salt?  Oh, please) the visible milk case is heavy on soy milk and imported yogurt (some, Im sure, with bits of yurt added for authenticity), and gourmet/organic everything.  Upscale all the way. I felt like I should have dressed better.

I had to ask a clerk where the eggs, bread, and regular milk were. I also mentioned how hard it was to find what I wanted.  She laughed and said, "well, I think the designers wanted people to have a real Shopping Experience when they come here. They put that stuff out so you have to go past it, maybe try something new."  Really.  I told her I dont buy groceries to get a Shopping Experience, I buy grocieries to eat.

The regular food was way the hell at the other end of the store in a plain brown wrapper, so to speak, and the bread aisle wasn't even marked.  I think they were embarrassed to have to sell Wonder Bread at all. *g*
I like my aisles to make shopping sense.  Dairy has all the dairy stuff, the bread is all together in one aisle, and let's have the spices in the cooking aisle, please. Where you want them to be. 

Never did find the hand soap.

cedar waxwing

There were a whole bunch of them in our old apple tree this afternnon;  they don't show up often,  but when they do they eat everything in sight.  really have to click on this to see him better...

http://www.birdzilla.com/birds/Cedar-Waxwing/distribution.html?Itemid=1044

Minnesota East

-20 this morning.  And we were in the warm spot.  Maine hit -35 in some spots, and I know Vermont was much colder too.  The good news is,  February is only one week away.  March is five weeks over the next hill.

And the even better news is, as you get older, time seems to move much more quickly,  and that includes winter.  It has been a wonderfully fast winter.  someone this morning said, if this kind of global warming keeps up we could die of frostbite and hypothermia...

Emily and the two Marks

in an effort to broaden my poetry horizons, i have begun delving into Emily Dickinson on more than a superficial level,  same with Mark Jarman and Mark Strand.  I read "The Continuous Life" by Strand, all the way through, and then went back and started reading more closely.  The more I read it, the more I see
why people call him a dark poet.  He does tend to drift off into fascinating  and occasionally disturbing 'what ifs' and while the writing itself seems at first fairly plain, the more you read the more it grabs at you.

 Emily is doing the same thing.  It isnt so much the individual poems but the body of work and your own speculations as to how much is metaphor and how much isnt.  Poets write about what they know, what they dream, what is familiar, in one way or the other.  From that premise, I'd say the only thing that kept  her sane was the poetry.  It seems to be almost dragged out of her, forcefully. 

I had mark jarman as an instructor several years back at a poetry festival in West Chester, PA. I wasnt all that impressed with him as such,  and his poetry at that time interested me only barely.  But in reading what I can find online, I wish I had read more of it then. 

And yes I have worked my way through Rilke.  I'm gainin' on him.

Since im not writing much right now and probably won't for a few more years, this seems a good time to absorb what's out there.  Whatever we read comes back later, changed, but there in some way.

weather report: mebbe a foot of snow, light and fluffy. More on the way. 

Snacks

its always nice to know you won't run out soon (although he has made a gallant effort here to lower the level)

Cuffy's new bed

the new bed, near the woodstove but not too near.  I dont know if the box just happens to be the shape of the cat or Cuffy manages to become right-angled to accomodate the corners.

Kinda pretty, innit.

Lost chances

The trouble with being adopted within the family you were born into, is that if it's kept secret (as it was in my case) from the child but not the rest of the family,  there is a huge burden imposed on everyone to keep that secret from that child until he or she knows.  

In my mother's family this meant forever.  It also meant that I was subtly kept isolated from relatives  as I grew older,  including my birth mother, who I grew up believing was my aunt.  I was never encouraged to write to anyone, aunts, uncles,  cousins.  Mother was terrified, I think,  someone would slip. 

I had three remaining cousins, with whom I have over the years lost any contact with. Last night, out of curiosity, I opened up the SSDI site, and found my cousin Jimmy had been dead for seven years. His brother Jack died a year later. Where cousin Marie is I have no idea, since I never could remember her married name. And this morning I finally understood that those three people were what I leaned against, knowing  they were out there, somewhere. Missed opportunites, lost chances, all the way. I feel sadder right now about that than anything else.

Barred owl looking backward .  He's been swooping around the yard lately, I suspect there's some damn good feeding out there right now.  The ground is cold and wet and muddy and if any fool mole or vole sticks its head up, there's mister owl, waiting   If this is our January thaw it's about three weeks early, but, then, we did have an early cold spell, too.  Split the difference, I'm cool with that...

yay it's christmas yay it's over

Not that we do much about it on a personal basis, but at least I won't be hearing Alvin and the Chipmunks for another year,  and all the pre Christmas sales  have turned into post Christmas sales,  and my latent guilt at not sending cards or buying gifts can go back in the carton with the tree we didnt put up this year.

I know, I know, bah humbug. Go, Scrooge.

Now we can settle back into the process of getting in and out of winter in time for spring.  Some years it's a close call.

Just in time for Christmas

Solstice Poem

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


WINTER SOLSTICE

At any time of the year
you measure the dimensions of the sky
one constellation at a time
give it perspective in terms
that you can understand

but at this darkest point
the nadir of the calendar
stars become much more
than pinpoints on a chart
sometimes it's all you have to steer by
and you begin to weary of the darkness
there is so much of it

Having lost the light
you announce yourself with candles
in every window
drape strings of icicles
from eave to eave
calling softly into the winter sky
over here over here

memories that never quiiiite fade

Everyone has from time to time been visited by the ghost of  a particular song, the kind of thing that drifts into your mind but seemingly never drifts away, just lingers behind a potted fern for the appropriate moment.  You are sorting socks and realize you're humming Yankee Doodle Dandy, and have been doing so since breakfast.  Yikes. Or riding to work, the strains of OOOOOKlahoma...suddenly careen around the corner of your mind,  and you know you'll be mentally singing "OOOOOklahoma where the winds blow heavy da da da" for the next eight hours.

It may be "London Bridge," or the Hallelujah Chorus, the entire "Memories", or "Old Man River" (even worse, Stan Freberg's version, "Elderly Man River") anything that plants itself squarely in your brain and sticks, wearing an ever deeper groove in the record up there. 

My own bete noir is  the Oscar Meyer Weiner song, with alternate endings, and on really bad days, Eddie Fisher singing "Oh My Papa".  Feel free to borrow either of these  if you feel the need for different material. 


Hope this  helps.

Earth cycles, 1, Global Warming 0

This morning at 5:am the thermometer read -1.  In Britain they are experiencing the coldest winter in 100 years.  Europe is digging out its long johns and wondering where they put the snow plows. 

Last year during the much-touted Global Warming conference in Denmark there was a blizzard.  Probably directly over the conference center.  This year the Global Warming folks are in Cancun and if I lived there, I'd bring in my pets and buy some warmer clothing.  It seems, somehow, that every time they decide to meet (and very expensive meetings these are, indeed) to 'discuss' global warming",  the thermometers plunge, and the conference tables turn to blocks of ice.   Perhaps if they turned all that money into actually doing something instead of actively discussing doing something,  I'd be a bit less cynical about the whole deal. 

Time to feed the stoves.  It's turning into a 3 stove day, for sure. 

Any forward motion helps at this point

In two weeks the days will begin to grow longer.  The one thing at this stage that gets me through the drama and drek of January, February, and ice storms, is knowing this.  Minute by minute, the day grows brighter sooner. 

A bit of nostalgia for what is now 'the good old days"

Something has gone out of message boards, as a general rule, and I miss it. There is no longer that free-wheeling sense of creativity there once was, bounded only by your imagination and what the board itself would tolerate. 

I cannot fathom any board out there now allowing the freedom to "spin" that we once had at places like Excite, or the old Speakeasy, Fresh Press, or even Multiverse  in all its strange incarnations. 

There are message boards, to be sure,  but they are specific; writing, talking about writing,  tractors, skate boarding, politics, etc etc.  The freedom to get down and stream-of-conciousness creative seems to have disappeared.  That may be why I have such a difficult time sticking with any one board, these days,   there's simply no room to haul in the bean bag chairs and the new bar stools. 

signage

Brought to you by the good folks who last year on their church marquee proclaimed, "BLESS GOD, AMERICA"--this year they ask us,  "IF GOD CARRIED A WALLET, WOULD YOUR PICTURE BE IN IT?"
It is hard to imagine the mind that could imagine God carrying a wallet in the first place. Strange questions arise. 

Does he have credit cards?
How much cash would God carry?
What about a driver's license? 
Insurance? 

the migratory habits of butterflies sometimes go awry