"February made me shiver..."

 "with every paper I'd deliver,

Bad news on the doorstep,

I couldn't take one more step..."

( from "American Pie" by Don McLean)

Art by   Laivi Poder

Truly, being in my middle seventies has turned my mind to nostalgia, or memory, and hopefully not regret.  In the month of Valentine's Day, I have been remembering the men I've loved in my rash youth.  I connect them all to songs from my youth, which now I can access through itunes, and can download and save and play on my ipod.  Those are words that didn't exist in my youth, though the songs certainly did.   Here are a few:

Angeles   (Enya)

A Summer Song   (Chad and Jeremy)

Try to Remember   (Harry Belafonte)

You've got your troubles, I've got mine  ( the Fortunes)

Yesterday ( Beatles)

I'll follow the sun ( Beatles)

We'll sing in the sunshine  (Gale Garnett)   

Here comes the sun (Beatles)

Stranger on the shore

Ventura Highway (Simply Red)

Waiting for Snow (Gordon Lightfoot)

Song for a winter's night  ( Gordon Lightfoot)

MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

Come to my bedside my darling  ( Eric Anderson)

I'll always be beside you

Fields of Gold ( Eva Cassidy)

I'll be seeing you  ( Judy Collins)

Miles ( Richard and Mimi Farina)

One time only ( Tom Paxton)

Greenfields (Brothers Four)

The green leaves of summer  ( Brothers Four)

The Promise ( Tracy Chapman)

All that you have is your soul  ( Tracy Chapman)

The good times we had     ( Peter Paul and Mary)

Friends   ( John Denver)

Last month I found out that Frank Reilly has died in Florida. He was 82, and had Alzheimers.  Sixty years ago I had an enormous crush on him, though our relationship was strictly platonic.  I had an email from him, out of the blue, in April of 2017, and we corresponded until 2020. Then, I imagine , his mind began to go,.

Others have passed away:  Jim Wambold, Pat Finnegan, John Whelley, Barney Galvin...

Now occasionally they show up in my dreams. 

insights from writers in The New Yorker

 

  Tufted Titmouse      artist: Diaga Dimza

The last few issues of The New Yorker have been filled with articles I really loved reading, and which provoked my own thoughts.

In this latest one, from February 26, Adam Gopnik had an essay called  "Four Years Later,"  about "What we can't learn from 2020 "--- the COVID Pandemic. He says "when normal life stopped  in mid march of 2020. He reminded me that a million Americans died before a vaccine was accessible . 

He says  "What if the Pandemic, rather than knocking us all sideways and leaving us briefly unrecognizable to ourselves, showed us who we really are?"

"KLINENBERG'S own figure on the pandemic ground is that America's exceptionally poor handling  of the crisis exposed   the country's structural selfishness:     tell people that they are on their own."  

I need to say more on this, but glare on the pages got to me tonight. 

our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.

"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."

Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years

are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.

A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."

No narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis

 

A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis   Hilary Kelly

talking about writer  Diana Athill

How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. 

“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.” 

Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.

"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."

She was still writing when she was in her nineties.   I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.

 

Only in winter

 

"There is a privacy about winter which no other season gives you … Only in winter…can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself."

-  Ruth Stout,  How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back

 

 

The Freedom of the Moon

by Robert Frost

I've tried the new moon tilted in the air

Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster

As you might try a jewel in your hair.

I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,

Alone, or in one ornament combining

With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.

By walking slowly on some evening later,

I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,

The colour run, all sorts of wonder follow.

 

The Dream of February

BY JOHN HAINES

 

         I

In the moonlight,

in the heavy snow,

I was hunting along

the sunken road

and heard behind me

the quiet step

and smothered whimper

of something following . . .

 

Ah, tree of panic

I climbed

to escape the night,

as the furry body glided

beneath, lynx with  

steady gaze, and began

the slow ascent.

 

         II

And dark blue foxes

climbed beside me with

famished eyes that  

glowed in the shadows;

 

I stabbed with

a sharpened stick until

one lay across

the path with entrails

spilled, and

the others melted away.

 

The dead fox

moved again, his jaws

released the

sound of speech.

 

         III

Slowly I toiled

up the rotting stairs

to the cemetery

where my mother lay buried,

 

to find the open grave

with the coffin

tilted beside it,

and something spilled

from the bottom—

 

a whiteness that flowed

on the ground

and froze into mist that

enveloped the world.

“The Dream of February.” Copyright © 1993 by John Haines. Reprinted from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Source: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1993)

Gardening in January...and February

 

In January and in February it begins with a dream.  These grey days I look out at my garden and imagine all the activity going on under the leaf litter and cluttered sticks and twigs. Struggling right now with my desire to "leave the leaves" and follow the guidelines for "overwintering habitat" from the Xerces Society, and clean up some of the messiness.  My faithful friend Micah, the grounds guy in charge of the courtyard, is pushing for a cleanup. My other faithful friend, Sister Mary Jo, is urging me ( and him) to leave everything until the temperatures reach the fifties .

January got away from me, not because I was particularly busy, but because my mind was occupied with worrying over a situation in our house.  With one of the sisters who lives here, and who is having some serious physical and mental problems involving a hoarding disorder.  That's about all I can say about that in this semi-public forum.

art by Kat Fedora

Here are some wintry poems :

Winter Trees

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

 

art by Olaf Ulbricht

 

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

BY LINDA PASTAN

I am learning to abandon the world

before it can abandon me.

Already I have given up the moon

and snow, closing my shades

against the claims of white.

And the world has taken

my father, my friends.

I have given up melodic lines of hills,

moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.

And every night I give my body up

limb by limb, working upwards

across bone, towards the heart.

But morning comes with small

reprieves of coffee and birdsong.

A tree outside the window

which was simply shadow moments ago

takes back its branches twig

by leafy twig.

And as I take my body back

the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap

as if to make amends.

Linda Pastan, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982). Copyright © 1982 by Linda Pastan. Reprinted with the permission of the Jean V. Naggar Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author

 

art by Penny Gaj

Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub

He built himself a house,
                his foundations,
                his stones,
                his walls,
                his roof overhead,
                his chimney and smoke,
                his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,
                his fence,
                his thyme,
                his earthworm,
                his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.

(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)

 

Tomorrow is FatTuesday - Mardi Gras day...

and the next day is Ash Wednesday....And  Valentines Day...

Deborah Gregg -  Valentines