Going Out Like A Lion

What a storm we had last night!  All the birdhouses balanced on our fence posts are blown over, and the front yard is littered with branches. 

 
The wind howled all night, unrelentingly, and this morning there was a thin coating of ice and frozen snow on the deck.  And the wind is still blowing strong.

It being March 30, I think this qualifies as "Going Out Like a Lion."  And next week?  Dare we believe the forecast? 

Mon Mar 31

68^°

41^°

Sunny

Tue Apr 1

70^°

42^°

AM Clouds / PM Sun

Wed Apr 2

73^°

46^°

Sunny

Sun and Snow

The predicted snow did not materialize this morning, other than a thin coating on the deck and some stray flurries throughout the morning.  So it seemed like a good day to finish cutting up that big log on the log pile and splitting just a little more firewood.  Highlands Roadrunner becomes by necessity Highlands Woodcutter from time to time.

It is always a careful balance this time of year as the firewood supply dwindles.  Ideally, this stack on the back porch should run out just when it is no longer needed:

That is good husbandry, perfect management of resources:  to use the very last piece of firewood on the last cold night, so that you don't have to carry several armloads off the porch, far away from the house, where firewood is stored over the summer.  Even more ideally, there should be no firewood left to store over the summer whatsoever. 

As I worked on the log, sawing and splitting and carrying, I realized how much I enjoy this simple uncomplicated work, stopping to stretch from time to time, listening to the wind howl up on the ridgeline, feeling at ease with saw and maul as the supply of firewood accumulated step by step.  It is very much like running a long race, one step at a time.  And then it began to snow again, and at one point I realized that I was cutting firewood, and the sun was shining brightly, and it was pouring snow.  Snow swirled around in the bright wind all around me.

A typical Highlands Spring!

False Start

Races sometimes have false starts, and I think this has happened.  Temperatures soared into the 60s on Friday and Saturday, but today there is a cold rain drizzling down - a good day to watch basketball and light a fire in the fireplace.  And dig in for just a few more days, because (really?) this is in the forecast for Tuesday:

So, back to the starting line everyone.  As Wallace Stevens once wrote (in a slightly different context), "It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping."

First Day of Spring

Everywhere, daffodils are blooming, and bright forsythia greets the eye around each corner.  On a long drive through the countryside this time of year, it is not unusual to see a cluster of daffodils along the road but no house nearby, or not any longer.  Perhaps there was a house here decades ago, a home where people lived and loved and raised children, and of course planted daffodils, leaving not even an old chimney behind.  As the Bard famously said:

"The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind." 

 But daffodils?  They will still burst through the cold ground every Spring, reminding us of new life.

Last Day of Winter

I had been thinking of all the little mishaps that had occurred on Tuesday when it dawned on me what the big and lovely thing was that was trying to be born:  Spring! 

Today is the last day of winter, and I awoke early with an unexpected feeling of energy.and purpose.  After exploring the settings menu on my DirecTV DVR, I realized that the number it had been calling, and failing to connect with, had apparently been inoperational for some time.  When I changed it to another number, it worked perfectly.  Thus it turns out it has been our DVR trying to call on our line, and not a problem with the FAX line at all.  I did my morning exercises, and everything just felt right - the complete opposite of yesterday.  So I decided this would be a good morning to run Bearpen.

Rain that was mere mist at our house started coming down harder on the way to Town - cold rain, in the 40s, perfectly suiting the last day of winter.  So I went to the post office and the hardware store (to replace the broken pull-chain receptacle in the closet), waiting a little for it to clear, and it tapered off just a bit, so I parked and began to run.  What a magical uphill journey!  The higher I ran, the more it began to clear, and my cold fingers began to warm up.  The summit was socked in with fog, but I could see the glimmer of light overhead - perhaps it was the beautiful first day of Spring tomorrow, waiting to be born, a big and lovely season of transition, growth, uplifting new beginnings.  I realized that whatever the mishaps that may occur, there is always an opportunity - especially significant in this lenten season - of repair, renewal, regeneration.  As I started back down the back side of the mountain, I realized that I had reached another kind of summit, and the rest of the day would be all downhill. 

So let's put winter behind us.  This quote from Socrates arrived in my inbox yesterday:

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new."

Something Big and Lovely

It's a peculiar thing that, from time to time, an entire series of events seem to go wrong.  And that's what happened today.  First, the new telephone line for the FAX machine installed last Thursday, seemed to be doing unusual things:  people were trying to connect to the FAX machine, even though nobody had the number yet, and while talking on the other line, you could hear someone dialing out.  A nice young Frontier technician showed up, checked everything, and failed to identify the problem; he said he could only find the problem if he was there while the problem was occurring.

The afternoon went downhill from there.  The power went out for three hours while I was in the middle of a domestic pursuit of some complexity.  The DirecTV satellite kept losing its signal and failed to power up again upon resumption of power.  We discovered a drinking glass was broken.  Then I stubbed my finger on the woodstove, which had been opened up during the power outage (the fire had gone out, of course).   And when I went to pull the chain on the light in the sunroom closet, it jammed and would not operate.  At that point I just stood there and laughed.  Could anything else go wrong?  Martha, who has been having trouble with her computer anyway, told me to stay out of her room for fear I would somehow infect it with the cloud of mishaps gathered around me.

Lee Bowman, our preacher, recounted in a recent sermon a story by Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies about a woman named Carolyn Myss, a world-renowned lecturer on healing:

"Myss had flown to Russia several years ago to give some lectures, and everything that could go wrong did—flights were canceled, overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel given to someone else. In all of this she tried to be a good sport, but finally, as she was traveling by train to her conference on healing, she broke down and began to vent to the man sitting next to her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far.  It turned out that this man not only worked for the Dalai Lama but knew him very well.  He responded to Myss in gentle tones, as he gave her an extraordinary insight. We believe, he said, that when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.”

What could that something big and lovely thing be that is being protected?

Days of Glory

Today Martha "pinned" a picture on Pinterest that had special meaning for me.  It is a picture of a particularly brilliant, glorious day, somewhere in New England.  Something tells me that the little band-shell in the park may be in Milford, Connecticut, I don't know why.  Perhaps my Mom or Dad told me that, or more likely it said so on the side of the box, because this is the scene depicted on a large picture puzzle that they worked out years ago, and then enjoyed so much that they had it mounted and framed.  It hung in their house in Florida for years, and then in my Mom's house here in Highlands before she moved to Indiana.  What a glory it must have been to gaze upon that picture on some hot, sultry day in Florida where they went to live in their retirement, and to remember that cool, crisp day sometime in their youth.

And what a glorious day that must have been!  They rarely "vacationed" when I was growing up, but nearly every Sunday afternoon, and especially in the Fall in New England, they would get in the car, packing us all in with them if we could be persuaded, and we would ramble up Route 7 to Canaan, on into western Massachusetts, even into Vermont, often returning well after dark with a little bag of apples, or some Vermont Maple Sugar purchased at a roadside stand along the way. 

Remember this candy?  Memories are made from such glorious days:  the brilliant red and orange leaves still on the trees, the golden carpet all around, the crisp autumn air.  And this sweet, sweet candy from our youth.  Days of Glory.