Tag Archives: outdoors

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Under where?

Under the hazelnut tree. A squirrel alerted me to ripe hazelnuts this year and I picked all I could. Yum! Thank you, squirrel!

I have to watch Sol Duc when I am not holding the leash. She will sit for a long time and then suddenly trot off somewhere else. She has favorite spots where she can plot to catch birds.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: underwear! I thought about using this photograph, but I am job hunting. It might not be the best choice for now.

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Blueberry mountain

My maternal grandparents bought property in Ontario, Canada, a place on a lake, because they couldn’t afford holiday property in New York State.

My grandfather died at 79 but my grandmother kept going to the lake. We had our own names for the surrounding properties, including blueberry mountain. At around age 90, my grandmother said she wanted to pick blueberries. We loaded into the boat and headed for that area. Lake Matinenda is on the Canadian Shield, so it’s all rock, rock, rock. There was no path. At one point I was helping my grandmother from below and my cousin was reaching for her from below. My grandmother was about 95 pounds at that point. She was going up a face of granite and getting out of my reach. “Have you got it?” I said frantically, worrying she’d fall. “I don’t know,” she said. But she did and my cousin helped. At the top, the blueberry picking was not that good, but the views were fabulous. My cousin and I agreed, we were not bringing her up there again! If she fell, we’d have to get her down the hill, into a boat, into a car and 17 miles into town. She seemed majestically unconcerned and denied having any problem climbing. It was way too much thrill for us, worrying about her!

Which brings us to today’s music!

And another Fats Domino, fabulous!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: thrill.

I took the photograph of Katherine White Burling in 1979.

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Berries

These are the berries the robins eat in late January, early February, when there isn’t anything else to eat. I don’t think they like them that much, but it’s what is left. They will eat them from the top of the tree to the bottom outside my clinic window, with a dozen robins in the tree at once.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Brilliant color

I took this on Saturday. This is the fire house. The leaf colors are fabulously brilliant this year. Often they are gone by now. We had a week where the night time temperatures were nearly freezing. Does that have anything to do with the brilliant colors?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: brilliant.

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Welcome dark

This morning I listened to this song and album.

https://thewinetree.bandcamp.com/album/kentucky

I bought the CD over a year ago at the nowhereelse festival in Ohio. I heard The Winetree live and thought it was gorgeous. I bought others for myself but this was for a friend. Today I realize that the entire album, every song, has sorrow and longing.

Which makes it an interesting choice for someone who said, “I am always happy.” The first time he said that, I thought, wow. That is not true. I don’t believe that, so who are you lying to? Himself first, right? Because it seemed so obviously not true.

I never gave him the album because he stopped talking to me.

When someone says an absolute, that is a red flag for me. I wonder if the CD was for the emotions that he is not in contact with and stuffs. I went through a time where I tried to unstuff all the old emotions that I hid in my complex and frightening household growing up. My biggest ones were grief, fear and humiliation. It was not safe to express those: they would be made into a story to entertain people. I started to deal with them two years after my mother died. My sister did too.

This poem, Butterfly Girl Comes to Visit, is about my sister and my unacceptable emotions. Another, Ride Forth, is about stuffing feelings and then bringing them up and letting them go. I’m not saying we are ever done. I don’t know if we are. I thought of it as going to the depths of the ocean. The trunk at the bottom is full of terrifying monsters, but I had to open it anyhow. And at the bottom or somewhere in the trunk, is Hope, just like Pandora’s box. It took a couple of years of work to get to hope. It was so hard in counseling that my days off were more difficult than clinic, and that is saying a lot, because clinic is hard work.

Our culture is so afraid of the dark and of emotions. By doing my difficult work, I could be present and tolerate patients’ often difficult emotions and say, “Well, I can understand why you would feel that way. It is a really difficult situation.”

I do not want to be happy all the time. I think that is silly. What I want is to feel my emotions, in real time, and be honest with myself about them. As Rumi says, grief may be sweeping your house clean for a new joy. How can we love without grieving?

Welcome to the rain and the winter and the dark, and welcome to resting and quiet, and the hope that the sun will return.

And on the other side: My mom loved me.