stupid me

I blamed the chisel

when it was

the hammer's fault

CROW ADMIRES THE DAFFODILS

Crow comes gallumphing in over the garden, settles on the telephone wire that runs along the road up the mountain, turns his big beaky head this way and that like he's admiring all the exquisite natural objects that would delight any tasteful individual, any connoisseur of the lovely-- like the cherry blossoms up there, say, but there aren't any yet, the con doesn't work from the start.

So he looks down as though to admire the bright new daffodils there by the oak, but he’s really checking out my shallots. I happen to have observed that he flopwinged in from the north, yet is sitting on the wire facing north; he turned around after landing, who does he think he's kidding, does he really think I'm still new at this? He's checking out my garden while pretending to be a nonchalant dilettante of the sylvan environs, what a poseur; makes me laugh like a crow, and he does not like that, no, he is not pleased, fixes me with a dark gaze over a stern beak.

He's a big one for sure, eats well, he's probably the Baby Huey I posted about a few years ago, couldn't stop caaawing for his mama to come back and bring him some food, he was so alone and starving, the big baby, his weight bending the chestnut branch, he was bigger than his mother and kept her on the wing I tell you, now he's like a lounge lizard in a tux looking for an easy mark, but he must know me somewhat by now, which is maybe why he's putting on this act...

He raves over those lovely daffodils, all white and yellow, great fragrance, yeah sure, I can see his beady eye counting my beans, they're those snap kind he likes, but they're covered with netting drat, because I know about crows, he likes my shallots too, but also netted and also drat, the chard is uncovered but he hates chard and this access is a disappointment. The shiny onyx eye beading at me seems to cloud over, but he's remembering for later, I can tell; he enters corvine calculating mode, forgets where he is, that I'm staring at him, getting his number.

He's thinking that the netting may very well come off those foody beans in a couple weeks, leaving them ripe for the taking on Thursdays and Fridays - when I’m in the office - and those spring onions too; then there are those promising young strawberry leaves over there, with no netting either, puts that in his potential summer dessert column; plus that's a likely spot for tomatoes right there, melons over there, zucchini, hmmmm... All going into his dark memory maw, the way crows operate but he has no idea I know this.

He concludes unhappily for now that there are NO bean sprouts NO strawberries NO naked beans or beakable young onions - What food then is this moment? What nourishment, this empty frame of time? He gets carried away with the drama part sometimes. But the mask of discrete connoisseurship soon falls away and he starts looking further afield: is that another garden over there? Now he's flopping across the air to act nonchalant for some other gardener, hopefully a novice with little crow experience...

Better keep the nets over everything till I've eaten it all...

THE THIRD BRANCH

When the early monkeys came to that specific evolutionary fork in the big old tree of life and looked forward along the left branch, they saw strange things up ahead, like more intelligence, protoconscience, moralities all vague and misty, and said Whoa, let's not go that way - they had their reasons - so they chose the other branch, took the path more traveled and got to the upper canopy where they are now, which isn't bad, actually-- mostly the tropics.

Then when our own foresimians came to the same fork they looked to the right branch and saw all those monkeys jammed up ahead, said Damn, that is way too crowded, give me some space, so they headed left into all that shifting civiloplasm where they had some room to think and did, and here we all are with a long list of haftashouldy stuff eats up our time.

So it happens that now and then, when I pause in my work at tilling and planting to grow some of my own food on my mortgaged soil, or at patching up my weathering residence, I watch the monkeys ambling houseless past my garden into the food-laden forest or sitting up in the arms of a tree comfy-munching on a natural snack that many humans say God has provided, and I think about the monkeys’ choice way back then, since now they can go anywhere, anytime, no 9 to 5, no visas, mortgages, suits, appliances or infidels... If I was back at that evofork right now on behalf of all humanity up ahead somewhere on the timepike, I think I’d check to see whether maybe there was a third branch we might have overlooked; you never know...

May as well think about it, since we wound up being able to.

ONIONS ARE A NUISANCE

It was a foggy Saturday evening in early Spring, the way early Spring gets up here when it heightens all the heartbreak. Like any green-thumbed shamus I was standing in my garden, my never quite finished garden, enjoying the fragrances that were burgeoning all over the place. Don't ask me about onions. Ok, ok, I was thinking about planting onions, anticipating that homegrown savor, when I should know way better than to plant onions up here.

Anticipating onions is bound to end in heartbreak, I know that too, but like a fool, again and again I throw handfuls of hope at dreams of the sultry bulbs and all they do is mock me with misty images that fade like the light in the dusk with their luscious come-ons, their tantalizing fragrances, their succulent textures, lead me on into dreams that don't even end in tears...

I was standing there lost once more in the dim reaches of unrequited vegetarianism when I heard a bunch of monkeys arguing. From somewhere below in the mountain forests came that horrible, grating sound all mountain onion fantasists abhor. When you've been up here long enough, you know that noise and what it means. You get to know it real fast if you love onions, it's not like anything else you ever heard, not like any other two creatures arguing, it’s a scrapy, whiny, selfish sound, a sound that knows no conscience, carries no morals or scruples at its heart, it is the sound of creatures that claim all onions, and it means they will be moving closer, they may be here any minute, they'd be coming for my onions, if I'd been fool enough to plant them again. Face it, onions are a nuisance.

Sure, I could wait around, grab some rocks, stand my ground, put up a nuclear-powered electric fence, but sooner or later I'll have to sleep, and then have to go away, do some shopping, buy some onions, go to a dentist, bank, post office... those monkeys may be redfaced but they're not stupid, they know things, they have savage skills, they know your habits and they can wait; they have no jobs, no place to be, no dental appointments no bank accounts, they just wait. You don't have that luxury, you're human: your life is not your own, you have a family, a job, a government, you have obligations, bills to pay, places to be, conscience, morals, papers to sign-- but not the monkeys, they occupy the other end of the responsibility spectrum. All your onions belong to them.

“But not this time,” you say to yourself in the dusk, pulling your hatbrim lower as monkeys argue in the distance...

A TRIP THROUGH THE VILLAGE

You drive down past the junior high school sports ground at the foot of the only cleared mountain slope faceted with rice paddies all the way up to where the mountain forests begin, roll on down past the public rice-polishing machine and the kitchen gardens left and right of the village houses - must be nice to grow onions, no monkeys down here - past the new log house across from the village hairdresser, then past the village doctor's office on the corner of the street that if you turn north leads to the workshop of the late Shimizu Uichi, a famed local potter, but today as you continue east the road slopes downward beneath the imminent annual pink rainbow of blossoming cherry trees that arch softly overhead, on past the metal workshop to the intersection, take a right onto the national lakeside highway, head past the two ancient boat-launching shrines, roll on past the marinas and the sailing school, then the nice old shrine by the small piney beach, with the kitchen gardens all along the narrow road back there-- you have to slow to 40 when you get past that shrine anyway, as it gets more residential, with the houses close to the road in the old-fashioned way, elderly folks walking with canes, kids bicycling along the narrow walk, and there's the famous old Arare senbei shop, then the gas heater shop and the sake store; the rest is mostly houses of the old kind that give the charm to these rural villages (our new neighbor way across the paddy slope says she moved here because she loved driving through that village, wanted to live near there).

It's still a narrow road, about as wide and curvy as it was a thousand years and more ago, when it was the only central way from one sea to the other via Kyoto, a way crowded with traffic of commercial and noble retinues, along which road folks of all classes also came out from Heian (later, Kyoto) for the summer coolness of Lake and mountainsides combined, went to famous old beach places like Ogoto and Omimaiko, where they could party, watch fireworks and stay cool in the hot times, which folks still do, come from the sunbowl of Kyoto over the mountain pass - what a journey, though, in those old woodwheeled oxcart days, jarring over the stony roads with the noble ladies' luxurious sleeves hanging out beneath the screens; slow travel, and dangerous; they had to have a retinue of guards...

They'd stop and visit the old and far-apart temples along the way, the ride would take them days and nights and days and nights over a distance we traverse in half an hour or so by train or car - though I'm driving a shorter distance this morning - you gotta wonder as you move along this way in the brightness, looking out the window and visualizing these things, what it must have been like to live that slowly, with no alternative in sight, but here I am already, just on time for my dentist appointment...

ONE YEAR LATER

“I dreaded finding my mother’s body, lying alone on the cold ground among strangers,” Mrs. Arai, 36, said. “When I saw her peaceful, clean face, I knew someone had taken care of her until I arrived.

That saved me.”

*

Tsunami Stories

*

Children of the Tsunami - BBC

(w/English subtitles)

PAIN IN THE ACREAGE

Artemisia vulgaris L. var. indica Maxim can be a real pain in the acreage if it takes over. Which like any weed it is always trying to do. I know, I know-- I'm being a bully, I'm being unfair in so crassly calling such a wonderful plant a weed, it's--well, the thing is, yomogi is a nice weed, I have to agree. It even looks gentle and unassuming, like a short friendly sheepdog with a splotchy green coat of droopy leaves. It grows all over the place in Spring-Summer; the garden is practically covered in green sheepdogs by mid-June. Need some yomogi? Just stick out an open hand and close it. If you're at my house you'll get a handful of yomogi; if you're elsewhere, who knows.

Yomogi spreads like a slow green fire, and would definitely be a noxious weed were it not so easy to pull up and so darned not-noxious at all, not to mention uniquely fragrant, in fact-- ok, downright useful, and in so many ways no less, and plants that grow wild in that quantity are just not supposed to be useful, it never happens; throughout life one wonders (mainly in childhood, when such questions are less subject to prompt resolution, and then again in the gardenhood of latterly life, when specially grown thoroughbred plant varieties too often wither and die as if cursed, and one cries to the garden gods in greater measure the question one first asked as a child, to wit): why don't plants we love grow like weeds do? Well, yomogi does grow like that, ergo the love thereof is somewhat iffy. Just goes to show you can't have everything, even when you do.

This yomogi I speak of in such rampantly weedy terms is mugwort, Japanese mugwort - mogusa, to be locally specific (hence, moxa, as in moxibustion) - in addition to being the yomogi of excellent tempura and yomogimochi (q.v.). What other not-really-a-weed type plant has the range of uses yomogi has, from profound medical to profound comestible, and gets away with looking and growing like a bona fide weed, yet puts into the Green Meanie Club those who would call it a weed?

Back when I had a big pain in the-- when I had sciatica and plunged a thick glowing toke of moxa onto a shochu-marinated biwa leaf placed right atop the sore region, the heat went in and in, and took the place of the pain, and left me grateful throughout. Still am. Yomogi is my friend, actually; I love yomogi. Who called it a weed? It's one of my best green friends!

Yomogi rules!!

MOVE OVER, EVIAN

As ever younger readers of these slapdash chronicles may remember, I have posted a few items about going up to clean the mountain forest stream from which we get our water via a system of tanks and pipes and gravity, and which requires outdoor maintenance because the stream, being alive, is naturally fidgety with gravity, topography, meteorology etc. Streams can get oppressively scientific; plus, like anyone else this one gets seasonally feisty and thrashes around in its bed on occasion, moving big rocks around; washes down tree branches and leaves, so the collector gizmo has to be checked and cleared weekly by residents taking turns, in addition to regular overall maintenance.

And like any system, this one has been showing its age. Mainly built about 50 years ago, it has been tweakily updated ever since but isn't going to be economically viable for much longer, and will sooner more than later have to be replaced in toto for quite a sum, so the committee decided to investigate the possibility of drilling a well at less cost.

We called in a geologist specializing in mountain aquifers, who explored and assessed the heights above us at the true foot of the mountain; there he selected a likely spot for drilling. We then contracted with a local well-drilling company to test-drill down to 60-70 meters, which we figured should be sufficient to reach water and our budget. They drilled that deep, but no water.

The subcommittee then gave them permission to double that depth, which was about as far as there could be water that we were willing to pay to reach. So they drilled down to 140 meters and struck water, which then had to be tested. The water testing lab said that this was the highest quality well water they had seen on this side of the Lake; they recommended that we bottle and sell it.

I can see it all now: Pure Land Mountain Spring Water ("It's Sacred!"), "Straight from the Gates of Nirvana!" "Holier than Evian!" Nah. Think I’ll just chill some, make some tea... In any case, water more sacred than Perrier will spring from our taps in April.

No more cleaning the stream, though; I’ll miss that, going up there mornings in all seasons, following the stream edge up through the forest, to do some work on behalf of my neighbors...

I suppose I could always lend a hand at Pure Land Mountain Water Enterprises...

GRASSES OF THE FIELD

In this still evening the air is soft-- yesterday's cold, but with a new warm edge we can feel in our animal selves as the barely rain falls. The long wild grasses now draping the mountainside, grasses that wore the color of dying leaves back in autumn, and in winter - where they edged from the snow - were dead grey, this evening have a remarkable goldenness that reaches from within, a power they have always carried, that isn't life, exactly, but isn't death either - that says in the darkling hours that life is returning, that there is no edge to being: simply wait-- new life is here, has never left.

Even in what we deem death there are things to be done in ancient, hard-learned ways; thus the grasses glow in the early rain: they have evolved, seeded, grown, seeded again for this purpose too, among the countless others, and teach us of our own purposes, in lives we might view simplistically as regrettable aging toward regrettable cessation. For us, as for the grasses and all that lives, there is function everywhere along the line of life-- before, alive and beyond. As in the grasses of the field, the line is always reaching further than we can ever know at any once; in our way through life we are immeasurable, especially within.

Nodding gold in the faintest breeze, the blades go on glowing until all is dark, for now...

A MODEST PROPOSAL

Come on, Monsanto, shine your light! There's no need to keep being voted the worst corporation in the world year after year! If GMOs are as wonderful for humanity as you've insisted dozens of times a day in courts around the world for the past 20 years or so, then stop going to court to keep the public from knowing that your patented wondergenes are already in their food and children! If GMOs are even half as great as you say, you should be fighting to label everything GMO! A GMO label should be a HUGE selling point, right Monsie? So get that love out there for everyone to share! Hey! Where'd everybody go? Why are my tomatoes glowing? What's happening to my hands?

Monsanto's Minions Attack CA's Right to Know About GMOs

Here’s my ongoing Monsanto links page, clear evidence that Monsanto is being illogically litigious and irrationally secretive...

ICICLES, EDUCATION

Kaya came over to visit the other afternoon and ran toward the house with more than her usual supernova of excitement, not because she was about to run inside to play video games, because there aren't any in there, or to do puzzles or draw pictures or write letters which she loves and can do for hours; she was overjoyed at spotting some big icicles dangling from the high eave that she couldn't reach, and then on the rim of one of the rain barrels she found a gleaming, straight, clear and thick icicle that she could get hold of and break off and lift up and look at from all angles - icicles held up high are filled with blue sky, as she demonstrated to all - then she had to find a worthy place for the shining crown jewel of the vicinity, she couldn't just throw it away or take it into the house and admire it by the woodstove, but where could she put it that would do justice to its beauty?

She searched and found the perfect spot on the front of our car, where the long diamond would fit snugly yet stand upright, pointing to the sky like an icicle should, to a child's way of thinking, like a diamondy thing from a story, and lo and behold, there stood the soul of fantasy, right on the front of our formerly just plain car, now turning into diamond. Clear and real was the magical ice, and the light it carried, so valuable and desirable, but shortlived, so all the more lookable at. When at last we went inside we could still see it from a window: a diamond full of sky, shining there in the dusk.

Almost goes without saying that Kaya is bored with school...

WIND vs. GUY

Bitter cold strong Siberian winds last night tried to blow me and my motorcycle off the road all the way up in the twisty dark, tumble me off down the mountain or into the deep dark of the forest just for a little windy fun, but I been there I'm from upstate NY, baby, used to ride my red-and-cream Columbia bicycle with the streamers on the handlegrips through the howling snow over ice and never even nearly fall, way back in the heart of those Tri-city winters, more like Antarctica vortexed to a frenzy through the Hudson Valley, of course I was only around ten then and I'm around multiten now, so there's that, but do I still have it, do I still have it yessss I did and do, I just hovered over the center of gravity like way back in time or hunkered over as needed, got in the zone and enjoyed the wind's frustration as it tried everything in its way big bag of airy tricks-- like a lull before a turn, then a brief hurricane during, then an even sharper opposite blast right while you're compensating the other way, stuff like that, this was Olympic level, but I still had enough to stay upright, the wind was all blustery at how blithely I was wheeling up through the best it could throw at this puny human, at least by normal earth rules, I mean after a hard day in an office in the city you gotta find some primal pride somewhere, and how better than to take on a winter wind in the dark on a twisty mountain road and win?

The wind had the last word in the morning, though, with the trillion tons of snow it brought from Siberia that I had to shovel as the air snickered all around me.

LISTEN RIGHT NOW

Today a fine sunny blue-skyed early Spring day up here on the mountain, me outside at last in late afternoon after wrestling to a draw with words up in the loft for the noonly hours...

Fine to be outside at last, full of ambition and tools in hand, here amidst the breath of trees beneath the calls of spiraling hawks to do some essential next year's firewood work. Just got started when I stopped at a sudden song from way up in the big oak tree, an intense and passionate riff with a special finish to it, repeated over and over with variations here and there and in the curlicue ending; it was a young early warbler, trying out a new Spring repertoire for all he was worth, adding what he felt to the old stuff.

He was bouncing around up there all alone like something of major importance was going on, as in fact it was. It clearly meant the world to him, and I got to share in that bit of joy. These early samplings of Spring swell the buds in us all, carry that ancient urgency right to our hearts from far before we ever were. His song carried all that too, made me stop my next year's work and listen right now to what's deeply going on.

SEEDS INTO THE WORLD

We had the traditional turning to Spring a few days ago, Echo doing the soybean-tossing ritual late at night; therefore we think of it as Spring already... So there I was, out in the late Spring afternoon today, thick curtains of snow in the way far north, that's yukiguni (snow country) up there, where it looks like it's still winter, but here it's perfect chill Spring weather for splitting firewood, and so I do. I have a new camphorwood splitting stump, which the landscaper down below left for me by the roadside. He left two of them. Perfect they are: sleek, heavy, fragrant, immune to decay...

The pauses are splendid too, I stop and rest the axe on the sawdusty ground, look up and see a blueing sky, the sun touching all with gold every now and then, and between me and the sky the lacework of the old chestnut tree, its limbs bare but for a few stubborn dun leaves and a last dozen or so spiky husks, now wide open as though shouting to the sky "I did it! I did it! I sent my seeds off into the world! To become big trees! I did it!" And right they are. Emptynesters know that feeling.

Working near the garden, thoughts of seeds naturally germinate into ambitions... Gonna try some tromboncino this year - heard the stems are too tough for the weevils to poke into... and some radicchio too (up here on the mountain? gotta try it!) and a zuke variety not so dependent on insect pollination, more like ad hoc immaculate conception; sounds interesting too. And some different kinds of basil in the new herb bed; more seeds waft on the mindwind...

The sky is getting bluer as I work, even as it gets colder, the split oak stacking up until the barrow is full, then it's wheeled over a ways and added to the cord-to-be, all those woody triangles a richening shade of pale gold, wooden ingots of wealth in the blue of the sky; then suddenly there are, all over the place - what must be - yes, they are: big fat flakes of snow, plopping straight down through the still air onto the split wood, the axes and me, the ground all around turning white, where in heaven did they all come from? It’s blue up there! Winter again!?

Not for the whole rest of the day, I hope.

THE ENIGMA OF THE WHEELIES

So this morning, because there was a bunch of heavy logs blocking the way I habitually take when staidly edging my motorcycle out to the conventional northside road, I had to remove the chain from the gate to the narrow bamboo-lined southside road, then for no discernible reason I what-the-hell zoomed out beneath the big oak, zipped past the garden, roary-jounced down the jaggedy bumpy stone steps, leaped the culvert at the bottom like stunt man, did a damn right! couple of rubber-burning whirly spins just for the hell of it then lay some more rubber in a long wheely nearly all the way down through the bamboo tunnel to the other road that leads back to the conventional northside road, where I was soon back in the quiet rut of the normal world's way down the mountain to the ho-hum train, looking as staid, unwheelied and nonrubber-laying as I generally do, and no one suspected, not one had a clue, excepting the crow that had been shocked by my actions at that hour of his day, and cawed from his overhead perch all the while at the what the hell I was doing, and the usually quiet dog across the way, who had never before had the chance to bark at a motorcycle bouncing down stone steps like in the movies, to say nothing of all the roaring and the superbly executed wheelies. At the office, those events were on another planet.

The days lead on, do they not. Especially the mornings...

COLD WEATHER RIFF

At last we've got some weather I can call cold, who grew up in upstate New York just south of the north pole where winter weather meant daggery January winds racing howling down from the north with icicle teeth as we teens stood thin-clad on the rimed streetcorners at night bein cool, hangin out... It just doesn't seem to get that cold any more, a situation that often prompts my fogey intro "Why when I was a boy...," begetting in turn that roll of the eyes in any teenagers or so in the vicinity "Oh no, not that story again, about the weather..."

Yeah, and unlike you kids nowadays at the age of 9 I used to go out at 5 a.m. in NY winter blizzards to deliver the morning newspaper before going off to school, and those were blizzards like you don't see anymore. One place I used to deliver the papers to in the wintry darkness was in the big old cemetery out beyond the edge of town. None of the dead subscribed, but the cemetery caretaker did, and he lived in the big old Addams family caretaker's mansion with its pointy spires and tall narrow windows, beyond the high, creaking, speartipped, slowly opening cast iron gate...

At the first squeal of the heavy gate there began to sound from the lower depths of the house an infernal howling, a devilish moaning, long and lowing, yearning for the flesh of a young paperboy trudging down the long wide deep-snow walk in the dark beneath the high arching bare-limbed, arm-waving, body-grabbing elm trees, toward the big plate-glass-windowed doors that glowed with a sinister nightlight there in the distance through the snowflake-spewing wind...

"What ghosts must live here," would always race unbidden through my 9-year-old mind surrounded by graves, the keepers of the air brushing my face with the whispering snowflakes of the dead...

That soul-chilling yowl was the eccentric caretaker's herd of Great Dane hellhounds, each twice my height on its hind legs, yearning pent up all night in the silent house until there was my sound at the gate...

As I approached the house the hounds arose from the cellar depths and began their clacking galloping yowling traversal of the long wood-floored corridor that stretched from the far back of the house to the front door, timing their journey perfectly in the dim light so that just as I reached the doorway and was about to place the newspaper on the doormat safely out of reach of the drifting snow their massive paws would strike the giant plate glass windows of the doors like bearclawed catcher's mitts and send a whang of a bonging gong shuddering thoughout the dead-air house and me and the universe, and the dogs would stand slavering overhead, booming their deep bass roar-bellows over and over through the ice-toothed morning air as I positioned the newspaper, turned and walked toward the gate and squeaked once again beyond their reach, until perhaps tomorrow, before dawn... Those were interesting times...

And that was cold, that was cold... you don't get weather like that anymore...

Or newspapers...

THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO

What confident, hungry innocents we were, that couple standing together in the garden of long ago, young bodies fading further from now with each tick, slipping slowly into the mists of the past. Yet they still live in us, still speak with our voices, breathe with our breath, still yearn at the core of the you and the I, in all that beauty, hunger and innocent bravery, but now aged with experience; my heart aches to see them standing there filled with trust of that widening distance, so new, so unworn at the edge of shadow... Little they knew that the infinite paths before them would lead to these precisely definable places, ticking past even now... Judging by his suit, her dress and the flower she holds, they went from that garden to a now-forgotten celebration, likely slept well that night, sped on with full hearts toward these faraway nows, together on a path so much of which I don't recall... Thanks from the heart for the photo, and for the thoughtful letter.

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

THE COUNTRY SIDE OF LIFE

When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals, not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.

The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers. City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way, isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts. And the sky---in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too, the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline." Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts in your eye.

Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there (not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks, thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails, owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees the city inserts along the avenues.

And insects---not cockroaches, which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family---but genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.

Then in the spring and summer eves and morns the oratorio of the frogs of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden or something, not to mention glimpses of ferret fox boar stag raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking of wet laundry.

And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced in these respective locales, but I will.

In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing, you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission fee.

Then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs, its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.

WINTER GOLD

I love to sleep in a cold house then get up and get warm by getting the house warm. In winter I sleep with the window open because I love the feeling of being living toast, with the contrasting wintry coldness on my face.

I will considerately pass up this serendipitous but excellent entree into what I believe are the debilitating effects of central heating and move right on with what I was going to say, that today the dawn was a cold icy one more suited to late February, when it seems the sun has just about given up and acts as warm as neon, the kind of morning that when you go outside to thaw the water pipes shows you where your nose is.

Out there in the predawn air, the only light was a sliver of the moon, dangling like a bright icicle among the black-ice branches of the trees reaching into a gray empty sky, the kind of sight that tickles your history, stirs up thoughts of ancient gods...

Our firewood stocks ondeck had been getting low, but fortunately in the deceptive warmth of yesterday I harnessed a bunch of springtime energy and lugged a bunch of stovelength primo cherry and oak wood, lifted and stacked 'em up on the deck so we had a good supply of the wherewithal for a bright warm fire, before which to gaze out upon the frosty dawn.

Winter has its gold.

THE NEXT GIFT

When in your life you have finished with the task of raising the child you've been-- the child we all begin with being-- when you are at last mature enough to move on, ready to bring a child of your own into the light of your experience, the moment that child is born an ancient door is opened to a place you never knew your heart could hold.

The difference between you then and you now is like the difference between a seed and its tree: neither at all like the other, yet each being the other, in the most secretly invisible and magical of ways. Thus we live and grow through stages with which life itself is deeply familiar, but to which we ourselves, at each advance, are utter strangers, entering new galaxies of being.

Raising a child is its own distraction: you have so few moments in that dense procedure to fully step aside, sit aside, think aside, stop and love as deeply as you can-- until, the moment you can, the child is grown and gone, loving on its own.

Then, if seasons follow, from that child is born the next gift: grandchildren. And on these new beings, now that you are free of the rush of child rearing, you can spend your love as freely as sunshine falls on green leaves. And when those grandchildren are far away, the question becomes what to do with all those warm rays? Thus is more indiscriminate goodness and warmth borne into the world.

Not long ago I came across a snapshot of my daughter when she was ten years old or so, a delightful little person I remember well, and realized I miss that 10-year-old very much; I tried to explain my feeling when she came to visit, now a mother, with my granddaughters, but I could tell she didn't really know what I meant. She hasn't been here yet. She'll understand one day, decades from now, when as a grandmother she's going through some old photos, and the past tells her what it told me, what it tells us all, if we stop to listen: open your arms to this moment and its children.