Wordless Wednesday - Fallen

For the Oaks

For every mighty oak, there was once

an acorn that held its ground.

 

In September, every garment in my closet has acorns in its pockets, seasonal offerings from the magnificent oaks of the eastern Ontario Highlands, from red oaks and white oaks and burr oaks. There are other species of oak in the province of course, but these are the oaks of my native place, and I think of them as my sisters.

On sunny autumn days, I find a comfortable seat among my kin, and we have long conversations, some of the most thoughtful and enlightening discussions ever. I have no leaves, and I don't bear acorns, but the great oaks welcome me nevertheless.

Pockets without acorns rattling around in their depths enfold other offerings, pine cones, walnuts, beech nuts, hickory nuts and conkers (horse chestnuts). I adore their shapes, their colors, their textures, their fragrance, the whole season of their fruiting, and I can never resist gathering them out in the woods.

Autumn is a season of entelechy, a time of becoming, a time of of once and future trees. How magical, that the little wonders I am carrying home will be towering trees in the woods long after my spirit has boogied off, and my mortal husk has been composted in some fashion or other. Vast amounts of information and creative will are stored within acorns' tiny, elegant shapes. Form, function, beauty, they have it all. 

Turning my pockets out this weekend before chucking everything into the washing machine, I realized that there has been a whole forest riding around with me for several days, and it made me smile. No need to pine for my tree sisters when I am away from the woods - they are right here with me.

Sequestered, Week 312 (CCCXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Standing in the Light

Friday Ramble - Autumn

This week's word comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus. The Latin likely hails from even older Etruscan forms. The first part of autumnus (autu) may originate in the Etruscan autu, related to avil, or year, the second part (mnus) from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing. There we have it. At the end of our etymological adventures is the burnished but wistful thought that another year is ebbing, another circling in what I like to call simply, "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our existence.

September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too. The Autumn Equinox on September 21 is one of the two times in the year when day and night are balanced in length. On that day, (also called "Harvest Home" or sometimes Mabon), the sun seems to pass over the equator on a journey southward, moving steadily away from us. Things are actually the other way around of course, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, our planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at its center, and we northerners go along for the ride.

The magnificent constellations of winter are starting to appear, and the dome of night is a treasure trove of deep sky wonders, a gift for stargazey types like this Old Thing. Beau and I were out stargazing last night, and this morning we were out again before dawn, the waning moon shining over our heads. When the sun rose, the stars vanished and every roof in the village was sewn with sequins of dew. With mornings like this, how can one feel anything except rich as Croesus and jubilant in spirit?

On early walks, fallen leaves drift around our ankles and make a fine rustling music. Earthbound foliage on the trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors. We pause to look at all the wonders around our feet, and it's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all. When I stopped to look at yet another leaf in the path on our early walk, Beau sighed and looked up at me curiously. I started to say that I was looking for a perfect leaf, then stopped and started the sentence over again. Every single autumn leaf is perfect, just as it is.

Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land―
in winter, the abode of swans,
magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth―
memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes
bubble up in your blood like early wine,
and your heart will be lighter than
the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply
of a curious local wine,
fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife
when the moon was new.
Who knows what freedoms
will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall
you will give up the search and know peace
in the fragrance of apple wood burning.
You will learn how to accept love
in all its masks, and the universe
will sing here more sweetly than any other place

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things
(February,1931 - May, 2017)

My friend was a wonderful storyteller and a fine poet. It is hard to believe it has been eight years since she left us and went on ahead.

Wordless Wednesday - Bumble Girl in the Gold

Pot of Gold

Recipe books rest on every flat surface, a sure sign that days are getting cooler and autumn is on its way. There are local vegetables everywhere, and they cry out to come home in one's basket, for careful attention and a spell of imaginative culinary alchemy. Ritual undertakings? Oh yes, kitchen magics are afoot. 

There is nothing better than a bowl of homemade soup on a cool night, and hallelujah, it is finally cool enough in the house for cooking. One of this week's exercises was a curried squash soup which was shared with a dear friend for lunch yesterday, and she took two containers home for lunches at work. When I make this recipe for the tribe, there is seldom anything left for me, but dinner last night was a small bowl of liquid gold with a sprinkle of paprika and a frill of rosemary from the pot on the deck. Yum. I could have been dining in a cordon bleu restaurant, it was that good.

On the weekend, a large cauliflower came home from a local farmer's market, and roasted cauliflower soup is next on the menu. It will be followed by a crock pot of sweet potato and black bean soup. Since the Roma tomatoes in my garden are finally starting to ripen, there will be a nice batch of minestrone early next week.

There is something uplifting about turning veggie odds and ends into a cauldron of something tasty and nutritious. It feels good to be stirring the pot again.

Sequestered, Week 311 (CCCXI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. 

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

A Bowl of Red

The first Macintosh apples of the season. Hallelujah!

Friday Ramble - Drifting Along in the Fog

On September mornings, the village is often a mysterious place, the earth warmer than the air above and the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Autumn is upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap, tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything in the village, draping whiskery trees, power lines, and the telephone poles that poke out of it like the masts of sailing ships. It smooths the edges of everything and rounds the contours of house and street.

The wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I wander along on our early walks. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer walking beside us, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen, leafy treasure. My departed soulmate loved early morning rambles, and he is always tucked in my pocket when we go out.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in village hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rattle and hum of city buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, commuters heading downtown to work, children chattering on their way to school.

Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air. The sound brings back childhood memories of freight trains rumbling through the countryside in the wee hours of the morning and sounding their horns in warning as they approached crossings. Raindrops beat a staccato rhythm on the roofs of houses near home, and little rivers sing through the gutters with their freight of leaves and twigs. Taken all together, it is atmospheric and symphonic.

On such mornings, the world seems boundless and brimming with luminous possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling. Part of me is curled up in the warm with a mug of something hot and a good book. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and happy to be doing it. 

Thursday Poem - September Mosaic

Before we come with rakes and crackling

energy to clean it up,

the backyard is precisely

as the dog prefers it -- left alone,

a natural selection

of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments

of music and disturbance, only

animals by half,

and will not let the season bleed

its shifting earth designs

of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod, and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged

are gardens, or hillsides

shorn to make a path for wired poles

or graveyards stiff with grief

or clearcut forests. Let me take care

of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe

is breathing in my breath, it plays

its tune in me, it dreams my being --

an unnamed, unrecorded god

becoming conscious as I am

of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.

Structure and spirit

are my codes. Nothing of life

is random or a trick

I draw myself a part of all

with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick

The circle of the seasons turns

and never comes back quite the same.

Fertile impulses in time

will overgrow the patterns I have sown,

return to animal wilderness

of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad

new seasons bud from stick and leaf,

new forces split a pod and spill the seed,

new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Dolores Stewart, Doors to the Universe
She was my friend, and I miss her.

Wordless Wednesday - Mellow Yellow

September, Taking Wing

It is the first Tuesday in September, and village children are off to school, walked there (or just to the bus stop) by nannies, proud parents, big brothers and sisters, and occasionally family pets. I have known many of the kids since they traveled about in prams, and here they are going off to school. Dear me, how time flies.

This morning, yellow school buses are rumbling along village streets, something we have not seen for a few months. The cheerful crossing guard who has presided over a nearby corner for years was back on duty in his jaunty orange vest, and we compared notes on how our summers had gone. He went fishing and played a lot of golf. Beau and I tended our unruly garden and did a little rambling. We were happy with how things had gone this time around. Before the wretched tumble, that is. 

The youngsters wear jackets in confetti colors, carry backpacks and lunch boxes in pink, turquoise and lime green, tote miniature umbrellas patterned in flowers or bunnies or polka dots. They bloom like pint-sized peonies out in the street, and watching them from the window, I feel like doing a little blooming too.

Only a short distance away, other brightly arrayed offspring have hatched out in thickets and hedgerows and are strengthening their magnificent orange wings for the long journey south to begin in a week or two. I love this time of the year, but I am always sad when the kids spread their wings and leave home.

When monarchs alight on fall asters in the garden, the combination of orange, purple and gold is dazzling. Every butterfly is a stained glass jewel, a wild, vivid and breathtaking wonder. Lacking a clearly visible black pheromone spot on the rear wing, the butterfly at the top of this post may be female, but I am not sure. Sometimes the spot is not visible in profile.

There are vibrant colors everywhere we look in early September, and they are a sumptuous treat for old eyes. It doesn't matter whether the riotous tints are on Virginia creepers, monarch butterflies, coneflowers or tiny raincoats - they invite us to kick up our heels and dance, or more likely just stumble and lurch about.

Sequestered, Week 310 (CCCX)

Happy September!

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Those places where our spirit is in harmony with the landscape call to us. Some of us feel at home where we are born; others look for it in places they’ve never been but long to find. Discovering the source of our sense of place, belonging finally to and in a fixed and particular landscape engenders a kind of relationship. It makes us care for soil and air and water in a deep way we will not feel if the countryside around us is a franchised, faceless and anonymous blur.

Fred First, from What We Hold in Our Hands
(with Fred's kind permission) 

Morning Offering

Friday Ramble - Little Ordinaries of the Season

It's small things that engage one's attention at this time of year: fallen leaves like confetti on the dock at the lake, trees raining acorns and crabapples, sunflowers inclining their heads and sending thousands of seed children out into the world, damp furrows where veggies flowered, fruited and have been gathered in.

Trees in the garden were touched by cool fingers overnight, and their grip on summer’s foliage has loosened. The fallen leaves rustle wonderfully underfoot. Bergamots, mints and sages planted for the bees and butterflies have gone to seed, and fall bloomers are sporting buds. One artfully curving branch on the ash tree behind the potting shed has already turned brilliantly yellow.

In the park, beech leaves float down in burnished, windblown drifts and come to rest on the trail at our feet. Sunlight flickers through the overstory as though through clerestory windows, and the woods feel like a cathedral that goes on and on forever. I am reminded of something John Crowley wrote in his incandescent novel, Little, Big: "The further in you go, the bigger it gets."

September is only a few days away, and autumn is already in the air. The little ordinaries of this liminal time between the seasons conjure an earthy litany that is colourful and spicy on the tongue, touched with a leaf-dusty fragrance that follows us wherever we totter and shamble and lurch.

Swallows are congregating on telephone lines before flying south, and skeins of geese move to and fro between rivers and farm fields. A new generation of monarch butterflies is testing its wings before flying south. Soon, the loons on our favorite lake will be calling goodbye as they head for warmer moorings, and the great herons will not be far behind them. Is it just me, or is there a restless spirit loose in the village and haunting the countryside at this time of the year?

It is cool here this morning, and far from recent thoughts of salads and cold drinks, I find myself pondering soups and stews, corn fritters and gingerbread, roasted squash, the first McIntosh apples lovingly folded into a baked crumble with oatmeal, maple syrup and cinnamon. Always, there is tea. Thinking about comfort food and culinary undertakings is a sure indication of autumn, all by itself.

Life becomes quieter as daylight hours wane. Temperatures decline, and migratory kin head for warmer climes. Leaves fall, and things go to seed. The light in this corner of the great wide world ebbs and flows. We watch what is happening around us, and we drink in every blessed thing like wine. Collars up against the wind, we potter about and peer into hedgerows and thickets. We feast our senses. Then we come home to tea and toast and molasses cookies. Home is a lovely word in any season.

Thursday Poem - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes

almost out of sight. They seem

to become natives of that

element, the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves,

an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like

water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck

to move things forward, who do what

has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field

deserters but move in a common

rhythm when the food must come

in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles

to dust. But the thing worth doing

well done has a shape that satisfies,

clean and evident. Greek amphoras

for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,

are put in museums but you know

they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy from Circles on the Water

Wordless Wednesday - Benched

Maggie Needs a Makeover

I discovered Maggie in a supermarket bargain bin years ago, and carried her home where she has presided over the garden for many summers. The lady is a trouper, but after several years, she really needs a makeover and a new wardrobe. Either I get down to brass tacks and give her what she urgently needs or I toss her into the rubbish bin. In light of her long and distinguished service, that would be heartless.

The old girl's straw tresses are hanging in strings. Her papier mâché face is cratered and flaking. Her burlap hat is tattered, and her once elegant ensemble is now a faded collection of frayed patches and blowing bits. For all that, she wears a wide grin.

I have a spool of raffia I can use to replace her tatty hairdo and an old cotton sun hat that will do nicely as a topper, but the best option for a substitute frock is probably a toddler's outfit from a local thrift shop. Getting out to such a place is going to be difficult given my present mobility issues, but I am working on it. 

My tatterdemalion (love that word) friend prefers to be a raggamuffin, and however her new clobber turns out, that will have to be taken into consideration. Perhaps I can sew a few patches on her new outfit? I am fond of her and will do whatever it takes. She reminds me of the stuffed Raggedy Ann doll I had as a child, and I hope to see her smiling face in the garden for many years to come. 

Sequestered, Week 309 (CCCIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with the deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear. 

Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

Harbinger

And so it goes..... The sun rises later and sets earlier. Mornings are slightly cooler, and fewer cicadas are performing in the dear old trees in the village. Pots of bright chrysanthemums are starting to appear on thresholds, and autumn is in the air.

When Beau and I went out to the deck around four this morning, the constellation Orion was poking its head above the southeastern horizon, and we waved to it. Then we went back into the house for a good cup of coffee and toast. Beau does not do coffee of course, but he loves a fine bit of hot buttered toast.

When the sun rose, I grabbed my cane and tottered out to the veggie patch to weed, water, tidy up a bit and check on the tomatoes. The exercise was painful, but the deed got done. A little tenacity and obdurate self-sufficiency go a long way.

My daughter and her husband will visit later today and liberate a lovely big bag of curly kale. If not for the trashed ankle, I would probably be trundling a barrow of the stuff around the neighborhood and dispensing it to everyone I meet. Is there a goddess of cruciferous vegetables? Just call me Pomona, or perhaps Demeter.

Friday Ramble - Abundance

I awaken early and lurch out to the garden wearing a faded cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, carrying my cane and a mug of Earl Grey. In the wake of last week's tumble, the stick is a must. Best not to go base over apex into the tomato patch. The vines have taken off in all directions, and I might not be found for days.  

The only sentient beings happy about the heat are the ecstatically foraging bees and the ripening vegetables in village veggie patches: beans, peppers, tomatoes, kale, chards and emerging gourds. Are veggies sentient, and do they have Buddha nature? You bet they do, and I suspect they converse among themselves when we are not listening. The zucchini vines (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over entire gardens, if not the whole wide world. Ditto the kale which adores the kind of weather we are having this summer.

The tomatoes are a marvel. Scarlet or gold, occasionally purpled or striped, they come in all sizes and some surprising shapes. The first juicy heirloom "toms" of the season are the essence of feasting and late summer celebration as they rest in a bowl on the deck: fresh-from-the-garden jewels, rosy and flushed and beaded with early morning dew. A wedge of Stilton or Camembert, crusty bread, a little balsamic, a sprinkling of sea salt and a few fresh basil leaves from the garden are all that is needed to complete both the scene and today's lunch.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance... That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming down the years to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include: ample, generous, lavish, plentiful, copious, plenteous, exuberant, overflowing, rich,  teeming, profuse, prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the exactly the right word for these days of ripeness and plenty, as we gather in the harvest, freeze things, chuck things into jars, "put things by" and store the bounty of summer for consumption somewhere up the road. Like squirrels and chipmunks, we scurry about, collecting the stuff in our gardens and preserving it to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long.

For all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering by the Old Wild Mother (Earth), there is a subtle ache to these golden, late August days with their dews and hazes and ripening vegetables. These days are all too fleeting.

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or the silence after lightening before it

says its names—and then the clouds'

wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed

from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not

alone. The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford, (from The Way It Is)

For my brother James Brendan Franklin
(March 10, 1960 - August 22, 2023

Wordless Wednesday - Floating

Small Wonders

On a fine morning in late August, a weathered cedar stump along the trail into the deep woods sports a colony of haircap moss (Polytrichum commune), also called common haircap, golden maidenhair and great goldilocks.

The delicate wonders emerging from the thatch are dancing sporophytes, fragile strands topped by seed capsules wearing raindrops and filaments of spider silk. Just beyond the right edge of the photo, a crab spider waits for a fly or other insect to put in an appearance, one fraught with peril.

How often does one wander along a trail and not notice such wonders? I suspect the answer is, most of the time, for this old hen anyway. My moss colony is a miniature jeweled world, complete within itself, its glistening raindrops holding the whole sunlit forest in their depths, upside down of course.

For the life of me, I can't come up with the right words to describe it. A tiny cosmos in the sunny woods, teeming with life. Its own history. Its own mythology. Its own stories. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Radiant. Perfect.