"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 

of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 

the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 

whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 

we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon

breathe away."

from Local Wonders

Ted Kooser

When I decided to use the Kooser quote above I had intended

to end with another quote from one of his poems. However while

flipping through the The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English

Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin I found The Ice by Gibson and loved 

the  poem so much I decided to use it instead. Kooser's strength is 

always metaphor and the image of life as a walk through the cars of a 

moving train really spoke to me. I could not resist complimenting it

with Gibson's poems dealing with the stages of life where the elderly

women has attained the wisdom to ignore the jeers of others and 

experience the pure joy of childhood. I love the ability of literature to

allow us to share the experience of others or view the world from a 

different perspective. We all use a variety of sources and mechanisms

to guide our lives and make sense of the world whether it is personal 

experience,  family, community, religion, political ideology, science or 

art etc. I really enjoy using science, nature, literature and paintings 

to inform my world view and colour my experience. And of course

pets and science fiction.

In winter we tend to hibernate here we are going for it.

Saturday I had hoped to go to an Ivan Eyre show but the 

weather took a real turn for the worse so I took some photos

of the usual suspects enjoying the heated bird bath. Today

we started with -20 celsius and have warmed up to -11 so

I am watching the CFL playoffs and thinking about vacuuming. 

"HER day out from the workhouse-ward, she stands,

A grey-haired woman, decent and precise,

With prim black bonnet and neat paisley shawl,

Among the other children by the stall;

And with grave relish eats a penny ice.

To wizened toothless gums, with quaking hands

She holds it, shuddering with deliscious cold;

Nor heeds the jeering laughter of young men --

The happiest, in her innocense, of all:

For, while their insolent youth must soon grow old,

She, who's been old, is now a child again."

The Ice

Wilfred Gibson

You are here, alive in this place,

touching with sight

things that are smoke tomorrow

from Alive in the World

John Haines

I could not capture the motion but all day the vent on 

the neighbors garage has spun round beneath its little

cap of snow.

Two days of snow and the feeders and heated  bird bath

have been the centre of attention in a cold and windy world.

And for me this is always a welcome site seeing that they

are here and things are, in this moment as they should be.

So the song is becoming as the world

becomes, and it can never leave us;

 because we are the notice in its passages,

from Song of the Ocean of the World Becoming

Pattiann Rogers

"Throughout this long flow of the seasons,

life in an infinite variety of forms. life dormant in bur
and bud, in burrow and pupa-case, life biding its time,

would respond to the increasing warmth."

Wandering Through Winter

Edwin Way Teale

But today our winter chapter begins.

"Now as I stand 

Before the the window and attend

The sailing, flurrying flakes, the whitening land

I seek again in vain some clue or key

To liberate the guarded mystery.

This much, no more I know:

That science,  fixed to finite laws

Is helpless to unveil 

The supervening cause

And so, once more, I fail.

Now in my eighth decade, no wiser now 

Than the spellbound child
who first beheld beguiled, 
Long seventy years ago
Enchanted snow."

                                               Enchanted Snow 
                                          Melville Cane

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. 

That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; 

where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and

 midnights stay. That country composed in the main of 

cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries 

faced away from the sun. That country whose people are 

autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people 

passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

Ray Bradbury

The quotes present two views of autumn. The pond two

weeks ago, drained for the winter there were large numbers

of robins and a few ducks taking advantage of the food 

exposed by the expanse of mud this revealed.

"Though we have not yet had a frost, the chill of early

autumn has come into the house, perhaps in the tattered

carpet bags of the field mice moving into the the cellar for 

the winter. Falling leaves have begun to blow past the window,

the lovely yellow leaves of time."

                   Local Wonders

                                        Seasons in the Bohemian Alps

           Ted Kooser

"Memories from age three or age five put on the costumes of dreams.

Things were happening then just exactly the way they happen now,

 but those things seem to be rich with inner life and happy 

discovery, and a fuzzy sense of the world."

 from Love and Irony: 

Postcards from a Child of the New 

York School

Katherine Koch

A few weeks ago the aphids were 
flying everywhere I noticed that they were 
particularly thick on my Red Leaf Rose, 
but help was nearby, the House Sparrows
 flocked to the rose alternating between the 
bird feeder and grabbing mouthfuls of aphids.
This allowed me to enjoy their antics and 
quiet beauty.

This also encouraged a bit of research on aphids. 
Spring aphids are parthenogenetic, the population 
hatching from eggs is comprised entirely of females
who then switch to vivipary or live birth without males.
Towards the end of summer they produce a winged 
population consisting of both males and females which
allows them to spread to new host plants.

The Prairie Gardener Book of Bugs
Nora Bryan & Ruth Staal

One thing that I noticed while watching the sparrows was

this Grey Squirrel, it came directly down the Amur Cherry 

ran thru the area under the feeders where the squirrels normally

feed grabbed a piece of gravel, bit it and ran away with it.

A week of so later it did the same thing.

I still have a fuzzy sense of the world.

"I watch 

the lamplight's clear pool 

on the ancient pinewood planks 

fall through cracks and knotholes 

onto the lives of mice as starlight 

filters through the window 

and falls on me."

from How I Understand Eternity

Brian Swann

 

"We have left less than one-tenth of one-percent of our prairie.

The rest of it died to make Iowa safe for soybeans."

Loren Lown quoted in

Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and

Promise of the American Prairie

 

I have not posted for awhile I thought I would finish

with photos from our trip home from the cabin in August.

Shaun a bit more woodsy now trots down the lane before

our two day car ride. The 9 hour round trip has been

split over two days with the dogs which allows for stops

and sight seeing. As always I am fascinated by the flat

landscape and vast sky of the prairie.

 

 

"On a bus headed South

The sky opens to a great bowl of prairie

distance is everything here.

the currency of wind, grass

the dance of clouds with their shadows"

 

draft

Guy

 

 

Some of the best places to stop are the access roads

leading to the oil & gas pumps and compressor

stations nestled amid the immaculate monoculture

crops of the southern prairie, better living thru chemistry.

Still one does find that even there nature continues.

 

 

A  brief passage thru the Badlands.

 

I believe I once received a tin Marx copy of this exact
barn for Christmas, I was a very lucky little boy. I also

recall my dog Lassie ( a pom ) gnawed the heads off

the plastic sheep.

"I used to think that the soul

Grew by remembering, that by retaining

The character of all times and places it had lived

And working backwards, year by year,

                                                      It reached the center of a landscape "
               
                                                                      from The Near Future

John Koethe