The View

Image: markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

From where I sit, I can see horses.  What a privilege to write such a sentence.  Yes, I put first look past the fire-escape styled terrace (nicer than the fire escape in the apartment I lived in as a child, but for all purposes a fire escape), then the bare wintering trees, and yes, I can see all the neighboring condos and huge houses, but there is a red stable, and when I don’t expect it, there passes the slender figure of a horse, startling me out of reverie. I think at first it is a deer I see, but in an instant, I see the horse I’ve come to regard as a friend.

My immediate neighbors are two artists, a musician, a poet, and a toddler, and if that isn’t romantic, then what is?  And, and,  in my view. are horses.  My dear college professor, Mr. Gifford, uses italics to impart humor, I remember now, remembering too the letters I mean to write.  A friend in San Diego lives in a condo that faces the sea, and she has a wall of windows that let her see every day the crash of waves.  Here, I hardly go to the sea, content with this view of trees, stable, horse. It’s not permanent, of course. And maybe it’s distracting.  I havent mentioned the birds that flit.  Fly.

Days of chai and dreaming gardens

close up of teapot by David Miller/dreamtime

Up until mid-week, it was all coffee and paper, comparison and contrast, puzzling over a sentence.  Then off went the electronic draft, followed by a solid hefty manuscript in the mail.  I made this delectable pancake for a breakfast celebration, substituting some main ingredients with what I had on hand, but it was nevertheless a royal treat.  I had gone to Mysore practice before as well–funny how things always taste better after yoga.  Later, with the oven still hot, feeling industrious,I baked an acorn squash, and then decided I needed a nap.

Today, I had the very odd underwater sensation of now, what?  What comes next?  I skipped yoga, never a wise move. I put in a load of laundry.  I began to read Tender by Nigel Slater in which he recounts the beginnings of his fruitful,splendid patch of land, and I tried to imagine what a garden, my garden, my garden of least effort, might look like.  A garden of least effort would require lots of leafing through catalogs, drinking many cups of tea, plotting in a notebook.  It would be a garden of winter leisure dreaming. I still don’t have an armchair.  Doesn’t every garden dreamer’s winter need one?  Overstuffed, taking too much room, piles of books and cups underneath?  Maybe I’ll just throw a coverlet over my slender couch and pretend it’s an armchair.  I’m already pretending I’ll have a garden.

First Snow

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bw1yTMJ0e-g

First snow on the tip of the Cape.  Tiny stars of flakes that have grown larger in the half hour I’ve been watching them, drifting in a dance of their own. No wonder Tchaikovsky composed the Nutcracker, because the snow today is a child-like ballet, full of quiet wonder that captivates as it builds to scene after scene.  The snow remains delicate, twirling–a most extraordinary snow or am I watching drift?

No, having stepped out, like an explorer on her suburban terrace, I confirm the weather: snow, as verb, active.

It is grainy, not the texture I remember from Boulder where the flakes were enormous, and signaled storm more than scatter.  Here, I think of ice, but that is because I think of car, and the roads here that seem like San Francisco’s (sort of, because as a friend from Cali once said, oh, people on the East Coast always refer to hills as mountains.) I think of ice only in anticipation of tomorrow, but not being in Colorado, but seaside, I should probably not anticipate.  In general, anticipatory worry is good to put aside.

Dance. Snow. Small flakes.  Season of lights, sugar plums, winter naps.

Still snowing.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fNasQfLWPHo

On a Different Schedule

Having returned from reading Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi blog, I realized how far I’ve come from the planning of my days to a semester’s schedule.  At this time last year, or even this year, if I were teaching in Illinois, I would be handing in my final grades, asking a friend to water plants, and heading home for the holidays with a copy of my Spring syllabus and some books to read.   I will still be heading home to New Jersey where there might be a tree or two, starry skies, and maybe snow. There has been no snow on the Cape so far, and this December has felt like October–bracing, if not balmy at times.  Isn’t another definition of balmy Global Warming?

It’s quiet, though, unlike October; the leaves have fallen, and the crowds have become weekenders. It’s still; time slows down, even if it’s Sunday. It feels like I am caught in a moment of hover.

It’s only three o’clock.

I think of Fanny Howe’s book, “O’Clock” which is a perfect holiday gift to give everyone.

I think of Murakami’s 1Q84 which I will read in January.

I think of the new Kate Atkinson I will take to NJ with me.

I hope this time I’ve got my niece the shell she wanted.

View at the Winter River Shore Against Sun/photosky/Dreamtime.com

Winter Distances by Fanny Howe

The Order of Words

The reason for my move to this seaside town is that my name was pulled out of a hat, real or metaphorical, as one of two recipients for  three-year residencies courtesy of The Fine Arts Work Center, providing affordable housing for artists and writers.  I’m told only four people applied for the two spots, which gave me a 50% chance, but in any case, more ex-Fellows ought to apply because the place is quite nice.

To be honest, I must plan everything a bit more here because there is no plan, except the large ones.  Teaching had always provided me a structure to my days, as well as the constant interaction with reasonably bright and intelligent young students.  Now I find I miss the way my days were ordered, although I could, say, follow my old schedule for class: write instead of teach for an hour and a quarter, have a fifteen minute break and stretch, and continue on until lunch.  Then I all would have to do was get through the two o’clock to four o’clock afternoon–always a rather dreaded abyss of time for me, but once it was four o’clock, ease returned.  Now, that abyss has gone, along with the strong sunlight of that time in the West, but then so has the 300 hundred days of sun, the mountains, my sangha.  Now I wonder, what exactly am I doing here?  Writing yes.  I find myself taking jaunts to town where I introduce myself as newcomer to shop owners.  A gentleman proprietor told me, seeing right through my apparent interest in beautiful things, that the hard work would be the work, and told me he wanted to see a novel completed in a year’s time, and a Pulitzer.

Today I read some of Edward Hirsch’s forward to The Everyman Library edition of  Keats poems and letters  (Edward Hirsch forward to John Keats) and felt exhilarated and connected to a world of words.  This is how it happens.  We read words and get ready to write.  We remember Annie Dillard and look to lay out a string of words.  We untangle knots, smooth out the lines, discard the hopeless, attend the Muse.

Beach Mart, November 2011

Beach Market, November 2011, Provincetown, MA

A Blooming Jade

the jade blooms

Sometimes, the unexpected happens and you discover a jade plant can flower. There is a Secret Garden kind of store here where I bought a jade with buds. I googled information, and found out the plant would likely flower in December.  A bit early then, for the flowers are coming out.

It’s warm for November here, though the sky is deceptively overcast, like snow soon sky.  The marigolds are still in bloom, and they are not the only ones. Yet it is winter, a season that began on the first of the month.  The sky is a mxture of grey-blue, grey-white, and grey.  I’ve propped open a window and the wind howls this late morning.

Leaving the west means leaving the sun, but thankfully, the health food market stocks Udi’s Granola, Chocolove Seasalt, Rudi’s Spelt Bread, and Justin’s nut butters. The joy in discovering Justin’s all the way out here! If only Conscious Coffee and Sanctuary Chai could make the trip, with Noosa Yogurt tagging along…

The black horse has hunkered down, sitting against the wind perhaps.  Now the leaves have begun to smash against the window.  The stairs creak.

Seaside Adjustment

Today the wind blows with such force that pools of water catch waves.  Imagine stink bugs and such surfing.  The Adirondack chairs blew off into the garden.  Up at four am, I heard the boom and saw the immediate darkness as the power went out this morning.  Such darkness and quiet.  All I wanted was coffee, but when I ventured into the kitchen with a flashlight, the stove wouldn’t turn on.  I cracked open a window, then shut it and went back to bed.  A few hours later, I realized all I needed to do was light the gas.  Coffee at seven-thirty was fine, but not as sweet as it might have been earlier.  The power came on soon enough, and I went online and found the photographs in the Times on the snowfall in NY.

The wind still sounds like flute music, unless someone nearby is practicing a wooden flute.  I phoned my parents and let them hear the wind.  Can a sound be bracing?  For a moment, the sun came out, and I thought to walk outside; just as my thought was to turn to action, the sun disappeared.

This is the seaside adjustment, the New England difference from Colorado, where sun is around 300 days of the year.  When I first moved out, I discovered I was exhausted all the time.  I wondered if the dip in oxygen from 5000 feet to sea level affected me in away that the reverse never did. Now the wind sounds like the sea, and I suspect as I write this, quite a few folks are headed to the beach. I will don my sunscreen and head out as well.

To Autumn, because it must be read at least once this season

Or heard:

To Autumn, read by Stanley Plumly, from poets.org

www.freeimages.co.uk

 

 

in the near distance, horses

My first morning in my new home I woke to fog covering the trees in a soft blur. At the window I saw pastures stretching ahead. My new home backs into wetlands, a few yards wide, it seems. Beyond, a few acres of meadow where there are horses. There are five in all: one black, one brown, one white, and two pintos, one of which must have been born recently. They are all, in a word, beautiful. The black horse is a bit of a loner, but the brown horse adores the white horse. He (I’m guessing) follows her, and stands close, not exactly nuzzling, but at this distance I can’t be sure. She stamps her front leg, he stamps his back; their tails flick.

Dragonflies and tiny birds swoop in the autumnal heat, and the squirrel looks in the window, affronted, curious, who can say? Maybe he misses the cat who lived here. Near noon, three large ravens–okay, crows–noisily investigated an old nest. Today’s sunrise looked like a Rothko painting, but with many more striations.

I’ve backed into paradise; I’ve backed into it before, but never with a such a view.

http://www.photographersgallery.com/photo.asp?id=2854