Snow and home again.

"No wiser now 
Than the spellbound child
who first beheld beguiled, 
Long seventy years ago
Enchanted snow."

                                               Enchanted Snow 
                                          Melville Cane

After mentioning that there was little snow, it snowed on Jan. 5th, the day before we were heading back to Calgary.

Then winter arrived with a vengeance. I sent this email to my family on Jan. 12th.

"We are okay. We had to go out for a minor medical errand this afternoon. The temp registered outside the cab, we made no attempt to start the car, was -35. That was not the wind chill. I did do a bit on the walk this morning and I said to Helen it was about as cold as I could ever remember. Nina and Whateley are only out for a minute or so but sometimes Nina limps in and has to be carried up the steps from the landing."


But it is supposed to warm up on the weekend.

Spring back/Winter Wonderland

 

  "Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, 

     its white flag waving over everything,

      the landscape vanished,

      not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

      and beyond these windows"

      from Snow Day

       by Billy Collins  

And let's remember.

White-tailed jackrabbit

Taken from the front window this morning. Despite the cars, dogs, coyotes and bobcats they share the city with we still have some white-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus townsendii).

"Cocked in that land tactile as leaves

wild things wait crouched in those valleys

west of your city outside your lives

in the ultimate wind, the whole land's wave. 

Come west and see; touch these leaves." 

from Midwest

by William Stafford

Morning

This morning I went out to shovel but this white-tailed jackrabbit 

was still resting so I came back inside.

“The Whole landscape drifted away to the north,

To Moose Factory, hundreds of miles, to the pole

And beyond, to the Arctic ends of the earth,”

A Window on the North

R.A.D. Jones

Polar Vortex - looks like it will be cold all week.

 

"snow
the day shut down like Napoleon
at Moscow
a day for art
the marvel of flight and of stillness
commotion and silence"

War and Peace
D. G. Jones

So we filled up the car, got some dog treats and snacks and prepared to hunker down.

We weren't the only ones getting ready. This squirrel is planning on getting into macrame in a big way. Helen is painting her miniature. Mine are still in the mail. And we can start patching the drywall in the big room in the basement this week.

A skiff of snow Sunday.

"in the distance. All the while the woods have grown dark,

and suddenly he looks across the table,

and you’ll see in his eyes that he’s lost."

from A chat with my Father

by David Bottoms

Title: Dog barking with magpie

 

The magpie(s) have decided Nina is fun to tease, 

so they do. Here they are exchanging views. I have 

seen them teasing red squirrels and cats as well. 

They seem to get a fair bit of joy out of life. We 

always enjoy watching the young gangs of teenage 

magpies investigating the yard. One favourite target 

are the tags attached to young shrubs, they really try 

to tear them off. 

  

"You’re the one who flew down

to that river from the heavens,

as if your form alone were the only

holy message needed. You were alabaster

then in the noonday sun."

from Stone Bird

by Pattiann Rogers

Very snowy day

  "burning on the snow
drag-footed across the fields
whiskey-faced men go

the blind lead the blind
and coarse oglers invade the
countries of the mind"

from Haiku on Brueghel
by Phyllis Gotlieb 

 While Calgary often gets snow in Sept and October, sometimes quite significant snowfalls, it normally lasts a day or so, then the autumnal weather returns. This year it has been cold and snowy for some days and today promises to be more of the same. 

from Snow Towards Evening by Melville Crane

"From some invisible blossoming tree

Millions of petals, cool and white.

Drifted and blew,

Lifted and flew,

Fell with the falling night."

 

Oct 14, Snow Day

 

    "Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, 

     its white flag waving over everything,

      the landscape vanished,

      not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

      and beyond these windows"

      from Snow Day

       by Billy Collins  

She, then, like snow in a dark night,
Fell secretly. And the world waked
With dazzling of the drowsy eye,

from Like Snow

by Robert Graves

Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary - Our Yamnuska Pack

Nova and Nickki

Yesterday we visited the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary outside of Calgary. Part of our tour involved spending 40 minutes with the Yamnuska Pack. These were beautiful, shy and gentle animals. The discussion with our guide was quite informative, but I am not going to paraphrase it and risk getting something wrong. Go see them for yourself or read the information on the website and make a donation.

https://yamnuskawolfdogsanctuary.com/wolfdogs/

Zeus

Nikki

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

From The Outermost House: A year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

by Henry Beston

First I selected the Pound from a Free Library while on a walk with the dogs. Then as we passed again I went beck for the Homer.

"For he has only just got back from abroad, and from a region so remote that one might well give up all hope of return once the winds had blown one astray into the wise expanse of sea, which is so vast and perilous that even the birds cannot make their passage in the year."

from Telemachus with Nestor

I often pick  up different editions of titles I already own,  especially if they are older editions by well known publishers. I enjoy reading different introductions and or notes for the same works. I also enjoy the sense of engagement with the past. The name in the top right corner indicates they came from the same person. And that person seems to have keep them for some time. Sadly there are no annotations. 

"All night, and as the wind lieth among
The cypress trees, he lay,"

from Speech for Psyche in the Golden Book of Apuleius

We looked for Pound's grave when we visited Cemetery Island in Venice. But it was a crowded graveyard and we settled for the grave of Igor Stravinsky.

"I had not thought death had undone so many." T.S. Eliot

Reader Rock Garden

"the shadow of
a mist shall yet
with but the time
this granite fret"

from Sky Spindrift
by James Wreford

We were very daring and went to the Reader Rock garden to see the flowers and have lunch with a friend. It was nice to experience some semblance of normality.

https://www.calgary.ca/csps/parks/locations/se-parks/reader-rock-garden.html

On a walk thru the neighbourhood

"Caught                              

           pressed into words

                                                made crazy with colour"

       from MOMENTS ARE MONUMENTS

           by Phyllis Webb

On a very rainy day here a photo from Florence 2019

“I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to 

Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral

dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, 

I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the 

bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, 

placed outside the church like a lone sentinel.

I stood as a Con Edison truck 

parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought.

from M Train, Patti Smith

Cedar Waxwings

We have had a flock of 5 or more Cedar Waxwings hanging around the

backyard for the last couple of months. They are such elegant birds.

"Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. '

from Flying at Night 

by Ted Kooser

First Flights

“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-colored sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.”

Clark Ashton Smith

A wet spring and lots of blossoms.

“Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, 

growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, 

were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. 

Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; 

tossing tumultuously under vast suns of 

jade green and balas-ruby orange; 

swaying and weltering in rich twilights, 

in aurora-curtained nights, 

they resembled fields of rooted serpents 

that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.” 

― Clark Ashton Smith, Lost Worlds

New Snow with Hare

More snow today. It seems spring is self isolating elsewhere, 
heeding government warnings about unnecessary travel. 
When I went out to shovel before bed I found a white tailed 
jackrabbit had claimed the virus stilled street.

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world
older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost
or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear."

from The Outermost House by Henry Beston

And we had good news tonight, we needed some.

Still waiting

I am not sure whether we will be able to canoe the slough this summer.

At present no one wants an influx of city folk and who knows when that

will change.

“Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing.” 

― E.B. White, Stuart Little