Friday Ramble - How Sweet It Is

It remains one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cold sunny days in late winter or early springtime when the north gears up for the maple syrup season. At this time of the year, the Lanark woods are filled with sugar bird (saw-whet owl) songs - it is nesting season and the tiny fierce owl (the male) sings to attract a mate. Legend has it that the saw-whet sings when the maple sap is running, and that the sap stops running when thunder is heard for the first time.

Clouds of smoke and steam rise from wooden sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the ambrosial fragrance of boiling maple sap is everywhere. The sylvan alchemy in progress is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the syrup cauldron or pot has profound resonance for me. I still have the battered Dutch oven I carried as I rambled the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head.

These days, there's the stockpot bubbling away on my stove, a rice cooker, a bean crock and an unglazed earthenware tagine, cast iron cooking pots by Staub and Le Creuset in bright red, a small three-legged iron incense bowl on the table in my study. In late February, early March and April, there are the sugar camps of friends in the Lanark Highlands. Miles of collecting hose in confetti colors are strung from maple to maple, and evaporators send fragrant plumes into the air. Tin sap pails and spouts are fixed to trees, and antique syrup cauldrons boil over open fires to demonstrate how maple syrup was made in times past.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence from the Anglo-Norman caudiere and the Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin. So is caldera, the term geologists use to describe the massive crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or the chamber's roof collapses. The largest volcanic caldera on earth is the vast Yellowstone Caldera in northern Wyoming which is actually composed of four overlapping basins.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere up there in the darkness, Cerridwen is stirring a heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cookfire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song. We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this old life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be of service, bubbling and crackling away in the background, making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

And so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken in early spring. Notions of alchemy bubble away gently in her sconce. Sparks fly upward, images of pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. She simply could not (and would not) be anywhere else, and she would not mind coming back as an owl in the Lanark woods in her next life.

Northern saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus)

Sequestered, Week 253 (CCLIII)

On the Edge of the Snowy Woods

Friday Ramble - For the Birds

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

In winter, I shovel a trail around the garden for Beau, but recent snowfalls have filled it in over and over again. Although his circuit has been dredged out several times in recent days, it is three feet deep in snow at the moment, and Himself is up to his houndy ears in white stuff when he goes out. He is not amused.  Clearing a path for him is slow going and more akin to tunneling than it is to shoveling, but we keep at it. One of these days he will be able to zoom around the yard again.

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 seed is scattered on the deck for ground noshers. There have been many mornings recently when just getting to the feeders was a chore.

Cardinals, blue jays, nuthatches, various woodpeckers and winter finches (pine siskins, purple finches, redpolls, crossbills) visit from time to time, but sparrows, chickadees, and juncos are always about. How can one not feel affection for the tiny feathered spirits who visit every day and chirrup their thanks when food is put out for them, even in the most inclement weather? I always hope that grosbeaks (evening, pine and rose-breasted) will turn up, but they prefer rural and suburban areas and only visit village feeders in the depths of winter when they are desperate.

Winter birds are always welcome visitors. I once wrote here about an icy morning when a sparrow flew into the house, made himself comfortable in the sunlit dining room for a few 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 plows are fast running out of places to put it.

Wordless Wednesday - Archipelago of Light

Sequestered, Week 252 (CCLII)

Wordless Wednesday - Flowering February

The Church of Winter Trees

The park is hushed at this hour of the morning. Clouds conceal the sky from here to there, and they hold the promise of snow. The silent trees along the trail are baroque columns holding up the winter day, and perhaps the whole world. The interlaced branches over our heads are cathedral arches dusted with fresh snowfall.

Now and then, the wind dislodges snowflakes, and they fall to earth, glittering faintly in the murk and whispering softly as they come to rest among the trees.

To walk along the trail would be a fine thing, but the thought of marking the pristine snow with our footprints is troubling. There is no need to announce our presence here or publish a claim to these moments and their perfect trappings. We will simply stand here and watch as the light dances around us and everything unfolds.

Sequestered, Week 251 (CCLI)

And Away We Go...

Wordless Wednesday - Still Standing

Happy Imbolc (Candlemas or Brigid's Day)

Thursday Poem - The Road

Here is the road: the light

comes and goes then returns again.

Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they

move through the world of stone and stars

whirling with you yet every one alone.

The road waits.

Do not ask questions but when it invites you

to dance at daybreak, say yes.

Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

Arlene Gay Levine

(from Bless the Day: Prayers and Poems to Nurture Your Soul)

Wordless Wednesday - The Visitor

From the Edge on a Winter Morning

Thursday Poem - Straight Talk From Fox

Listen says fox it is music to run

over the hills to lick

dew from the leaves to nose along

the edges of the ponds to smell the fat

ducks in their bright feathers but

far out, safe in their rafts of

sleep. It is like

music to visit the orchard, to find

the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the

rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself

is a music. Nobody has ever come close to

writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot

be told. It is flesh and bones

changing shape and with good cause, mercy

is a little child beside such an invention. It is

music to wander the black back roads

outside of town no one awake or wondering

if anything miraculous is ever going to

happen, totally dumb to the fact of every

moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your

seasons making love, arguing, talking about

God as if he were an idea instead of the grass,

instead of the stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is

responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not

give my life for a thousand of yours.

Mary Oliver, from Redbird

Wordless Wednesday - Coming to Light

Espresso, Icicles, Words Gone Walkabout

I awaken before sunrise and brew a lovely espresso in the De'Longhi, then stumble into the study to write a blog post, trying not to drop the dear little beaker clutched in my arthritic paws. The crema on this morning's effort is to die for, and so is the sumptuous fragrance. Pleasing curls of steam rise from the surface. Yum.

One or two recent photos are OK, but I can't for the life of me figure out what to say about them. The words simply will not come. For someone who spends so much time with her nose in a book or thinking about the provenance of words, their reluctance to show up and pirouette into place is a distressing state of affairs. 

Perhaps the biting cold has something to do with it. When Beau and I ventured out into the sleeping garden this morning, dark clouds obscured the sky, and the thermometer out on the deck registered a temperature way below zero.  It is sunny now, and the skies overhead are brilliantly blue, but oh, the antarctic contours of the day...

During the present cold snap, older houses in the village have grown some fabulous icicles. When sunlight shines through them, they shimmer and dazzle, and they seem to hold the whole universe within their glossiness. One can almost forget what a gelid and windy undertaking it is, the restless enterprise of trying to capture them with a camera. The best place to take photos of icicles is often right underneath them, and doing such a thing is reckless, but sometimes I do it anyway. Beau (of course) sits several feet away and is safe from falling ice.

On the Edge

Friday Ramble - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, we (Beau and I) are a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky, shadows, snowdrifts,spruce trees or the cast iron crane standing out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months now, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck out there until springtime rolls around again. We like seeing it when we pull the draperies open in the morning.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when one is all wintered out and decides not to sketch another icicle or frame another photo of such things, another eloquent winter composition presents itself to the eye. Something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above a frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. Snow crystals adorn the evergreens overhead and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, the last faded and tattered oak leaves from last autumn flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy spruce boughs in late January? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within itself, each entity conveys an elemental serenity and equilibrium, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Beau looks up at me, grinning and wagging his tail, and for a minute or two, my doldrums take a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough, and they are. They are more than enough.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Each and every one is a wonder to behold, to remember with my eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, I can do this for a little while longer.