Eyes on the Sparrows

Alas, most of the last week has been spent clearing countless cubic meters of white stuff from around the little blue house in the village. At times, the threshold, cobblestones, driveway, sundeck and steps have disappeared from view completely, and getting out and about to do anything at all has been quite an exercise.

In winter, I shovel a circular track around the garden for Beau, but recent heavy snowfalls filled it in over and over again, and it has been dredged out several times this week. Himself has often been up to his houndy ears in icy snow, and he is not amused.

After waiting out high winds and heavy snowfall in the cedar hedge, village birds are hungry, and first thing in the morning, the garden is filled with clamorous fluttery folk waiting for their breakfast. Before anything else is done, bird feeders are cleaned and refilled, and a few handfuls of seed are scattered on the deck for ground noshers. 

Cardinals, chickadees,  blue jays, nuthatches, woodpeckers and winter finches (pine siskins, redpolls, crossbills) visit often, but sparrows and juncos are always about. How can one not feel affection for the tiny feathered spirits who visit every day and chirrup appreciatively when food is put out for them, even in the most inclement weather? I keep hoping that grosbeaks will turn up, but so far they have not put in an appearance, preferring rural and suburban areas and only showing up here when desperate.

Juncos and sparrows are always welcome. I once wrote here about an icy morning when a sparrow flew into the house, made himself comfortable in the sunlit dining room for several minutes and sang joyously, then flew back out into the garden when he had warmed up a bit and had something to eat. Sparrows are as numerous here in winter as they are in most urban areas, but it is always a pleasure to spend time with the little passerines when other bird kin have migrated to warmer climes.

Depths is an appropriate word in these circumstances. We are almost drowning in snow, and village snow plows are fast running out of places to put it.

Cup and Morning Light

Catching the Sun

Winter Dreaming

A Portrait of Beau

Beau has been here with us for a few weeks now, and he has settled happily and seamlessly into his new life.  He is mending the aching hole in our hearts left by Spencer's passing last month.

At fourteen months, our little guy is still very much a puppy and the whole wide world is an adventure. His delight in every single thing he encounters is something to see. He runs like the wind through the Two Hundred Acre Wood, and he is poetry in motion when he does, seeming to float effortlessly above the ground.

He has claimed the four poster bed in our guest room as his own and arranges the pillows on it to suit himself. He loves fresh peaches, strawberries and his mum's homemade gelato, and he absolutely adores tummy rubs. One of his favorite evening pastimes is chasing fireflies.

Note the black tongue in the second photo. He had been helping me in the garden and could not resist sampling the lovely dirt we were rearranging.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday - Watching the Rain

His name is Beau, and he is a lovely boy.

Almost Eleven

Spencer would have been eleven next month, and he was our much loved companion from August 2008 until this week when he passed beyond the fields we know. He had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma in early May, and the disease rampaged through his system like wildfire.

Opiates were no longer holding our sweet boy's pain at bay, and we made the heartbreaking decision to send him off across the rainbow bridge a few days ago. He undertook his last journey on Wednesday with the gentle assistance of his veterinarian, Himself and I holding him close and crying. I hated leaving his dear little body behind for cremation, and I felt like a murderer that day. I still do.

Like most German shorthaired pointers (GSPs), our little guy was highly intelligent, and he was very athletic.  He was a strong swimmer, and he ran like the wind, had oodles of endurance and was a perfect sidekick in the woods. On woodland rambles, he was always at my side, and he defended me fiercely against moths, bumbles, dragonflies and grasshoppers, convinced that they were up to no good, and his mum was in grave danger.

He liked to run off with socks and slippers, and he excavated gargantuan holes in the garden when the spirit moved him. He understood almost everything that was said around here, and it was difficult to put anything over on him.  His elegant nose could sniff out cookies, homemade gelato, bison burgers and Brie at a distance of several kilometers. As a senior citizen, he developed an expressive grumble and wandered around the house commenting resonantly on just about everything he saw. We gave up chocolate because he couldn't have it too.

Spence had a heart as wide as the world.  He loved us with every particle of his being, and we loved him back with every particle of ours. The house is empty without him, and we can't believe he is gone. His bed, bowls, blankets and toys are where they have always been and where they will stay.  There is a hole in our hearts, and a raw wind is blowing through it, but we know his big sister Cassie was waiting for him in the sunny fields beyond the bridge.  Please let it be so.

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names - and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles - you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head -
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford,
(from The Way It Is" New and Selected Poems) Greywolf Press 1999

For our beautiful boy, Spencer, July 5, 2006 -  June 14, 2017

Sad, very, very sad...

This is a painful post to write, and I contemplated saying nothing here at all but thought that would be a cop out.

On Wednesday afternoon, our beautiful Spencer will make the trip across the rainbow bridge, held gently by his parents (Himself and I) and assisted by Dr. Sue who has given him such loving care for the last nine years.

Our boy has gone everywhere with us since he arrived in August 2008 after Cassie's passing, and he has been the dearest and finest of companions, but helping him on this last journey is the most loving thing we can do.

Last month, moving about became difficult for him, and off to Dr. Sue we went. Tests were done and a small osteosarcoma in his right shoulder was identified. A second set of tests carried out yesterday showed clearly that the cancer had expanded aggressively.

For the moment, our sweet little guy is on morphine, and he is resting comfortably for the most part, but his comfort will be short lived, and we will help him on his way in a day or two. In the meantime, we are heartbroken and inconsolable. A world without our (in the immortal words of Chaucer) "veray parfit gentil knight" does not bear thinking about.

Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land—

in winter, the abode of swans,

magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth—

memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes

bubble up in your blood like early wine,

and your heart will be lighter than

the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply

of a curious local wine,

fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife

when the moon was new.

Who knows what freedoms

will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall

you will give up the search and know peace

in the fragrance of apple wood burning.

You will learn how to accept love

in all its masks, and the universe

will sing here more sweetly than any other place.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

(from The Nature of Things)

My friend Dolores passed away unexpectedly last weekend.  and I am still trying to wrap my mind around her departure. A gifted author and a fine poet, she walked through this world cherishing its innate abundance and wildness, and she loved it fiercely. Lit from within, she blazed with life and passion, and somewhere beyond the here and the now, she is still alight.  I have to remember that.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Spencer hears the coyotes singing.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We are of the animal world. We are part of the cycles of growth and decay. Even having tried so hard to see ourselves apart, and so often without a love for even our own biology, we are in relationship with the rest of the planet, and that connectedness tells us we must reconsider the way we see ourselves and the rest of nature.

A change is required of us, a healing of the betrayed trust between humans and earth. Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, our solution to the mystery of what we are.

Linda Hogan, from Dwelling: A Spiritual History of the Living World

The Sisterhood of Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in February. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You brew endless pots of herbal tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally very irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan the cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way.  The great horned owls who live on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are now building their nest in an old oak tree about a mile back in the forest and getting ready to raise another comely brood.  It makes me happy to think it is happening again.

This morning, a single delicately frosted leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind, and it came to rest in the birdbath in the garden, bearing in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, snowy earth and clouded sky, wandering eye and dancing leaf.  Out of small and frost-rimed doings, a mindful life is made.

My friend Penny had an infectious grin and a dry sense of humor, a passion for crows and ravens, for organic food and fair trade coffee. She adored her cat, McBain, and she loved indie book shops.  She gave wonderful hugs, and she enjoyed getting them. She was a livelong member of the Sisterhood of Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf, and when spring arrives, I will plant a tree for her, not far from where the owls are nesting now.  Wild soul that she was (and still is), she will love it.

By Holiday Pen and Spoon

In the days before Christmas, I awakened from time to time with a whole bag of chilling thoughts.  What if I had forgotten someone, neglected to carry out some holiday task or other?  What if the free range organic turkey breast (and all the stuff that went with it) was a complete fiasco and our holiday meal was a disaster? What if guests fell on our sidewalk, had an accident on the way over for dinner? In predawn darkness, my unsettled mind worried, fretted, pondered and spun on its axis like a tiny, cold and unknown planet somewhere beyond the rim.

What was I worrying about? Refrigerator and larder were stuffed full of good things to be cooked up or roasted.  Gifts were wrapped and waiting to be opened. There was a fine list clipped to the refrigerator and getting longer by the hour.  There was a telephone to use in contacting guests and offering to provide alternative ways for them to get to our threshold.  There was e-mail.

Somewhere in the midst of all the toings and froings on Christmas morning, I looked down at one of my lists and found myself engaged in what can only be described as a moment of eccentric pleasure: at the lovely thick lined paper I was writing on, at my old Waterman pen and how it felt in my hand, at the color of the ink and the effortless way it was flowing onto the page, at the sound of the silky nib lightly caressing the paper.

In hectic times, such small pleasures are vivid, graceful and unexpected, a comfort in one's life.  They are also a powerful reminder that things usually turn out somehow, if not as one expects they will, then certainly as they should.

Christmas was perfect, and I would love to be around for several more.

Little Friend on the Trail

Chickadee and Hawthorn

Catching the Sun

Lad Among the Leaves

Now We Are Ten

Happy tenth birthday to the dear little guy who has been our constant companion since he came to us as a two year old in late August, 2008.

Like most German shorthaired pointers (GSPs), Spencer is intelligent and very athletic.  He's a strong swimmer, and he runs like the wind, has oodles of endurance and is a perfect sidekick in the woods. On woodland rambles, he defends me fiercely against moths, dragonflies and grasshoppers, convinced that they are up to no good, and that I am in grave danger.

He likes to run off with socks and slippers, and he excavates gargantuan holes in the garden when the spirit moves him. He understands almost everything that is said around here, and it is difficult to put anything over on him.  His elegant nose sniffs out cookies, homemade gelato, bison burgers and Brie at a distance of several kilometres.  As a senior citizen, he has developed an expressive grumble, and he wanders around the house commenting on all he sees.

Our boy has a heart as wide as the world.  He loves us with every particle of his being, and we love him back with every particle of ours. Happy, happy birthday, Spencer and many more of them.

The Ardent Listener

Spencer listens to the geese.

Wordless Wednesday - Ardently Attentive