Granted

I’d asked for snow, and my wish was granted. It snowed in Boston over the weekend, the cold drizzle J and I walked through on our way to see the Bruins on Saturday night changing into wet snow by the time the game was over. It was a magical moment when we emerged from the arena and stepped into a whitening world where snowflakes were falling like feathers.

It was a slippery, slushy snow: I wouldn’t have wanted to drive home in it. But we didn’t have to drive on Saturday night; we just had to walk to the T, and I’d worn my new winter hiking boots, which are warm, waterproof, and heavy enough to provide good traction.

By Sunday morning, we had the best of all worlds: bright sun, blue sky, and the novelty of fresh snow. Saturday night’s snow was dense and wet, so it clung to trees, creating the lovely look of a winter wonderland with every branch and twig outlined in white. Somehow, almost miraculously, this wet snow melted overnight from streets, driveways, and black-topped sidewalks, leaving the Sunday morning delight of crystal-bright whiteness with no real need for snow shovel or snow-blower: a winter wish granted.

Click here for a photo-set from Sunday’s winter wonderland. Enjoy!

 

December drab

It’s a gray day that feels like snow: a gray day that almost needs snow. We’ve fallen hard, it seems, into December drab, that season of bleary gray transition that needs the mitigation of snow to brighten it.

There’s a reason why folks long for the cheer of a white Christmas. In addition to the nostalgia and romance inspired by countless songs and greeting-card landscapes, a white Christmas brings a touch of brightness to a world largely lacking color and light. After the leaf peepers and the glowing, multicolored objects of their peeping have gone, what remains are gray days when the sun is noticeably on its way toward setting by mid-afternoon. Snow isn’t simply pretty; it’s like a reflective safety vest the earth dons on her darkest days so we can still see her–and still find light for our souls–after the sun has sunk. In a season starved for light, snow helps reflect and thus preserve every last ray, an essential kind of recycling.

Reggie is hunkered down, sleeping deeply; he knows the proper response to darkening days is hibernation, a diligent curling into oneself to rekindle every last spark of inner warmth. We humans, on the other hand, eschew hibernation, turning busy as the sun stoops in seasonal decline and rushing to buy presents and prepare for holiday celebrations as if merely moving will be enough to stave off sluggishness.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I saw a terribly ill-conceived ad that offered shoppers the promise of “Your holiday list for less”…except the design and font made it look at first glance like it said “Your holiday listless.” During a season when listlessness threatens to dominate, this ad unwittingly communicates the entirely wrong message. What we need on gray days isn’t more listlessness; what we need during the depths of December drab is the verve of holiday merriment and energizing inspiration of seasonal scents–pine sap and cinnamon, hot chocolate and nutmeg–to stir us from our stupor and drag us from the toasty cocoon of quasi-hibernation.

What we need during the depths of December drab, I hate to say, is the sight of snow to brighten our palette.

I took these photos yesterday, when it was sunny. The first photo illustrates how unseasonably mild it’s been: warm enough for houseflies to bask on fallen leaves. Today, it’s cold and rainy…with a forecast of snow.

 

Fair and fowl

It’s become something of a holiday tradition for J and me to take a long walk on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year, we decided to leave the dogs at home and take a stroll to Newton Cemetery, where we’ve walked in the past.

J and I like to walk at Newton Cemetery for the same reason I like to walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Newton Cemetery is basically a pretty park where people happen to be buried. Because of the graves, the atmosphere at Newton Cemetery is quiet and tranquil: you can walk the roads without worrying that cars, joggers, or cyclists will run you down, and you can take your time looking at monuments without feeling like you’re hogging the view of other browsers, as I sometimes feel at museums. In a good garden cemetery, all the lanes are the slow lane, so you can enjoy a leisurely stroll admiring the landscape, remarking on the architecture, and paying your respects to strangers. Since Newton Cemetery is a gentle walk from J’s house, going for a cemetery-stroll feels like one way of meeting the neighbors, even if those “neighbors” no longer happen to be alive.

Walking in a cemetery also serves as an excellent reminder of how grateful you are simply to be alive. When J first suggested that we go to Newton Cemetery for our Thanksgiving walk, I quipped, “Ah, so we can spend Thanksgiving afternoon being thankful we’re not dead?” J immediately responded, “Yes, and that’s true everyday.” Ah, yes: a point well taken. Every time we’ve walked at Newton Cemetery, J and I have happened upon some particular marker that stops us cold, whether that’s been a tombstone with my name on it, the grave of a local victim of 9-11, or an entire field of war dead. This trip to the cemetery, we spent a lot of time looking at markers of the recently deceased, many of which had been decorated for the season by grieving family members. There’s nothing like a tombstone bearing a autumnal bouquet from a grieving widow (complete with a greeting card, “To my husband on his birthday”) or a yet-unveiled stone for a stillborn infant (freshly adorned with toys and with the carved inscription “Step softly, our dream lies buried here”) to make you realize how lucky you are.

And then there are the waterfowl. Like most garden cemeteries, Newton Cemetery has several ponds that add a quiet, contemplative tone to the landscape, and like most cemetery ponds, the ones at Newton Cemetery are popular with ducks and geese. During a cemetery stroll last spring, J and I chatted with one widow whose decision where to bury her husband was decided in part by the ducks and geese of Newton Cemetery. Over the years, whenever she’d visit her husband’s grave, she explained, she and her children would bring stale bread to feed the waterfowl, making an otherwise sad visit a bit more happy. “My children love it here,” she explained, gesturing toward her now-teenaged kids. “One of my sons said the other day that this cemetery isn’t a dead place, because there’s always something new to see here.”

Always something new to see, indeed. Just when I’d thought that the waterfowl of Newton Cemetery was limited to the usual mallards and Canada geese, on Thursday we spotted a half-dozen hooded mergansers who carefully kept an entire pond between themselves and our impertinent camera lenses. Apparently even a cemetery doesn’t always provide the privacy that wild ducks crave, at least when the local paparazzi are taking a stroll.

Click here for a photo-set of the various waterfowl we saw on our Thanksgiving Day stroll at Newton Cemetery. Enjoy!

 

Gossamer

J and I are really low-key when it comes to the holidays. Our shared attitude toward Thanksgiving is very similar to our shared attitude toward Valentine’s Day: if you’re grateful (or in love) 365 days of the year, it’s not hugely important to feel extra grateful (or extra in-love) on an officially sanctioned holiday. If you’re grateful (or in love) 365 days of the year, Thanksgiving (or Valentine’s Day) really is like every other day.

Yesterday morning, for instance, I took Reggie on our usual morning dog-walk. Along the way, I saw (and photographed) two different spider webs outlined in water-droplets: remnants from this week’s drizzly weather. Spider webs are even more difficult to photograph than raindrops are: spider-webs are often invisible, and even when you can see a spider-web, it’s often difficult to get a point-and-shoot camera to focus on something so delicate and insubstantial. Point-and-shoot cameras like to focus on things that are big and obvious, so something as gossamer-fine as a spider web is a tough capture.

It feels silly to admit it, but when Reggie and I got home from yesterday’s otherwise ordinary dog-walk, I felt absurdly grateful to have seen and photographed spider-webs: not one but two instances of serendipity in a single morning! Counting “spider webs” among one’s Thanksgiving blessings seems insanely sappy, but that’s how I felt yesterday morning. At that moment, “Thanksgiving” wasn’t a matter of counting big blessings, it was a matter of realizing the silly little things I appreciate each day: small blessings other folks might overlook.

On any given day, for example, I feel absurdly grateful to be healthy enough to walk the dog and tend to my work. When I come home from a long, tiring day teaching, I feel grateful to have a job that demands so much (every last bit sometimes) of my energy. Every time I go to the grocery store, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to be able to fill my trunk with food, and I feel a similar sort of gratitude whenever I balance my checkbook or pay my bills. Beyond the basic blessings of having my health, a job, and enough money to provide food and shelter for myself, I find myself filling my journal day after day with scribbled sentences noting how satisfied I feel simply to sit at my kitchen table after another boring breakfast while Reggie lies sleeping on the floor. “I’m grateful for the sound of my dog breathing” sounds absurdly silly if you mention it as being one of this year’s blessings, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve said something similar in my journal, on plenty of days other than Thanksgiving.

I think we Americans need a holiday like Thanksgiving because most days, we live in a culture of complaint. When you turn on the TV, you’ll see talking heads shouting to see which political party can complain the loudest; when you turn on the radio, you’ll hear callers who have spent precious hours of their life waiting to voice their dissatisfaction with local sports, politics, or whatever. Around the office water cooler, workers whine about the boss, the workload, or the clients. At the local bar, you’ll hear folks complaining over cocktails about their partner, their mother-in-law, or their kids. Surfing the Internet, you’ll find a good portion of both the blog- and Twitter-sphere devoted to online rants and workday frustration. Venting is an important part of one’s emotional well-being, we tell ourselves, and complaining is one of the central ways we bond with other people. But why exactly should this be so? Why do we spend 364 days of our lives talking amongst ourselves about what’s wrong and only a single day-long holiday counting what’s right?

On this morning’s dog-walk, I noticed that both of the spider-webs I’d photographed yesterday were gone, having broken or been washed away under the weight of overnight rain. Now that those webs are no longer there, I’m even more grateful that I saw and photographed them yesterday when I had the chance. An annual Thanksgiving is like a point-and-shoot camera that focuses on blessings that are big and obvious, but most of the things we have to be grateful for are small, easy to overlook, and gossamer-thin. Today’s blessings might not be around tomorrow, so why wait another year to count those serendipities that can’t be numbered?

Click here for twelve random images from yesterday’s morning and afternoon walks around the neighborhood: a dozen ordinary blessings I’m grateful for.

 

Undeterred

This morning, I dropped my camera…again. Today was another gray, drizzly day, so I was taking more pictures of raindrops, and while I was fumbling with one gloved hand trying to slip my camera into a rain-protected pocket in my purse, my camera slipped out of my hand and crashed onto the wet sidewalk below.

Again. My everyday-use camera already looks like it’s been through a battle, and perhaps it has: I use it, after all, nearly every day and in nearly every weather. I first dropped it last December, when I fell down some steps while taking an oddly angled shot, and ever since my everyday-use camera has had a badly dented lens housing that prevents the lens cover from opening and closing completely. Today, at least, my camera was off when I dropped it, so the telescoping lens-housing wasn’t extended and thus didn’t get banged up any more than it already was. But the impact of the drop was hard enough to jostle the memory card out of place, and now the lens cover doesn’t move at all when I turn the camera on or off. Ooops.

The camera itself continues to work, however, as these shots prove. I’ve learned over this past year that a camera doesn’t have to look good to take decent pictures as long as you remember a few simple things. If your automatic lens cover no longer works, for instance, you’ll occasionally have to open it by hand; otherwise, you’ll get shots with a dark shadow in one or more corners from where the lens cover was still partially extended. Similarly, if you’re shooting with a banged-up camera, you have to remember that a camera without a fully functional lens cover will fog up after you come inside from carrying it in your pocket on a cold day. But these limitations aren’t too troublesome if you accept them as a necessary part of using a well-used camera.

Now that I’ve taken a year’s worth of pictures with a banged-up camera, I’ve grown rather fond of the thing. We all have our battle scars, and I’d like to think that they attest to the strength of our character as well as the depth of our experience. Now that I’ve taken a year’s worth of pictures with a banged-up camera, I’ve determined to continue using it until it is truly is worn out…or until I’ve dropped it one too many times and dies completely. In the meantime, I’ll keep shooting in all weathers, undeterred.

 

Not yet

It’s been a gray day, as was yesterday afternoon. The mail carrier whom Reggie and I often see on our morning walk said it feels like snow, and she’s exactly right: the clouds and even air have felt heavy all day, as if the very weight of the atmosphere will out of necessity crystallize and fall in the form of snowflakes.

Someday soon, perhaps, but not yet. This afternoon when I went to the grocery store, it was drizzly and cold, but still well above freezing: chilblain weather. Now that most (but not all) of the leaves have fallen–now that most (but not all) of the fallen leaves have been raked, blown, and bagged–we’re settling into the monochrome monotony of Stick Season. Sometime in the next few weeks, after we’ve grown tired of the muted grays and browns of late autumn, we’ll gladly welcome a dusting of snow to brighten things up a bit. Just not yet.

 

Dreaming of birds

It’s probably not surprising that, as a birder, I occasionally dream about birds. Almost always, the birds I see in my dreams are unidentifiable. Instead of dreaming I saw actual tanagers, buntings, or grosbeaks, I often dream of seeing some weird creature I’ve never seen in books: the kind of creature you’d say you’d never dreamed of.

In these dreams, I’m always without a field guide, so I spend most of the dream staring at the unusual bird and reciting its field marks to myself, forcing myself to remember a combination of colors that seems so striking, you’d think it would be easy to identify later. In nearly all instances, though, I wake up without remembering exactly what I saw. Was it an orange bird with green wings and a purple head? Or was it a purple bird with green wing-bars and an orange rump? Whether or not I actually remember any of the details, though, the simple fact remains: the birds of my dreams don’t exist. Even if I could remember their field marks, I’ll never find them in any field guide because they represent an idea that doesn’t exist outside of dreams.

One night last week, I dreamed I saw an unbelievably bright, lemon-colored bird, the size and stockiness of a large sparrow. It literally glowed in the tree it was in, its plumage similar in color to the reflective, Day-Glo vests that runners wear after dark to avoid getting hit by cars. More incredible, though, was the texture of its individual feathers, which were curly, giving the bird the nubbled appearance of a close-cropped poodle or short-tufted Berber rug. In my dream, the astonishing nature of this bird’s plumage reminded me of the overlapping, crowded and curled petals of dry hydrangea flowers, leading me to repeat to myself over and over, astonished, this most remarkable of field marks: “It looks like a yellow hydrangea-head! It looks like a yellow hydrangea-head!” And then I woke up.

 

Vehicle

Given the fact that I have both a Flickr tag and blog category devoted to cars and trucks, it took me a while to decide what photo to post for today’s Photo Friday theme, Vehicle. With so many options to choose from, I’m faced with an embarrassment of riches.

Rather than recycle an old joke, I decided to share two never-before-blogged photos from earlier this month, both of which feature the leaf-on-vehicle motif. Cars can be shiny status symbols, but they are also ubiquitous, an essential part of the visual backdrop of our lives. Walking down an ordinary street, only automotive aficionados notice parked cars, and then only if those cars are noteworthy collectibles. But our cars say a lot about our selves, considering the amount of time some of us spend in them. They bear our bumper stickers, carry our toys both cute and creepy, and sometimes end up junked in our yards. An image of a windshield covered in fallen leaves or a back bumper reflecting a row of raked ones transports to a place called “autumn” just as surely as a set of wheels can.

This is my contribution for today’s Photo Friday theme, Vehicle.

 

Purely prosaic

Several days last week, I was able to blog my morning journal pages, having had some topic or theme in mind during my morning dog-walk, then exploring it in my journal. It’s easy to post to my blog when all I have to do is type up, with minor revisions, whatever I scribbled in my journal that morning. But some mornings my thoughts aren’t that organized–some mornings, I walk the dog without having any one thing On My Mind, so I end up filling my journal pages with scribbled nonsense that’s of interest to no one but me–just the trivial minutiae of this and that.

It strikes me that just as I’ve always liked keeping a journal, I’m always interested in reading others’ journals. May Sarton is one of my favorite writers not because I’ve read much of her poetry or fiction; she’s one of my favorite writers because I love her journals. Journaling is a loose, more comfortable genre than sometimes-prissy poetry or the formal rigors of nonfiction. If personal essays are the literary equivalent of jeans and a T-shirt, journal entries are like a well-worn bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. In a writer’s journal, you can see her or his mind at leisure and lounging. What kind of logical leaps does an active mind make when nobody but the trusted page is looking? What kind of thoughts does an insightful thinker harbor before revision has tidied things up?

I often find myself wanting to re-read Sarton’s journals, her prose being so delicious, and on my intellectual bucket list, I’d like to someday read Henry David Thoreau’s and Virginia Woolf’s complete journals cover-to-cover. We read excerpts from Thoreau’s 1851 journal in my Thinking & Writing class, and these snippets always leave me craving more. When I see the way a practiced journal-keeper wraps her or his mind around a sentence, I wonder why the world even needs poetry, the rhythms of prose seeming more than ample enough for anything the mind or heart could ever wish to convey.

 

Just add water

Saturday was rainy, so I spent a good part of my Sunday morning taking pictures of raindrops.

Raindrops are difficult to photograph with a point-and-shoot camera, as the shiny reflective surfaces that make drops of water so interesting to look at often stymie a digicam’s auto-focus. This is part of the reason, I think, I like to take pictures of raindrops: I appreciate a good challenge.

I also like the way that simply adding water to something makes it look different and even strange, as if this most common of substances is actually a kind of elixir, transforming yesterday’s plain old leaves into this morning’s bejeweled beauties. It’s good every now and again to look at the same old world through different eyes, and if you can’t find new eyes, the distorting lens of an ordinary raindrop will serve a similar purpose.

This morning was sunny and clear, so yesterday’s raindrops have long since evaporated, leaving nothing to commemorate this weekend’s rain except Monday morning mushrooms.