Snowing

We've been "passed over" by the snowstorms that crippled the Northeast over Christmas and through most of January, but the latest storm hit us.

Only eight inches... not so bad.

Heavy, wet snow - very beautiful.

I think of the first two stanzas of an old poem I learned as a child:

The First Snowfall

by James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

Found the iPod !

After three days of obsessive searching, it turned up. Under the bed. What does this say about the state of my scrambled brains?

I'm so relieved. I'm also very happy to be able to finish listening to Henning Mankell's Wallander

novel, One Step Behind. It's a page turner... what should I call that when I am listening to it? It's a Swedish police procedural; the hero, Kurt Wallander, is a dynamic character, and the plot is gripping. This is the fifth Wallander novel I've read/listened to.

I Lost my iPod this afternoon...

What a sense of loss. I had it in my skirt pocket - stupid - shallow pocket - and somewhere between my office at school and the car, it slid out.

I've looked everywhere... including going back over to the Mount to retrace my steps, and all through the car with a flashlight, but to no avail.

If some student has picked it up, I hope they turn it in. When they see the type of music stored on it,they will know that it belongs to an old coot:

Christmas music from Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.... Joan Baez in Concert... The Beatles... Fleetwood Mac... whole books like The Help, and several Wallander murder mysteries, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince... podcasts of music from the Taize Community... clearly not your

undergrad's choice of stuff!

Photos of birds and flowers and gardens and Cape May...

I realize how attached I have become to this little machine.

Telling myself I can live without it...

Zick Dough Hits the Spot!

To the left you see a Titmouse chowing down on the Zick Dough I have stuffed into the top of the suet feeder on my windowsill.

Zick Dough is a concoction devised by Julie Zickafoose, one of my favorite naturalists and bloggers. It's made of melted peanut butter and lard mixed together with oats, flour, cornmeal, and Chick Starter. The birds love it.

I have had great entertainment watching them go for it.
I keep waiting for a Bluebird or a Robin to find it.

January in Emmitsburg

Some new poems

In the weeks of resting up, I have been writing. Getting another manuscript together. I think this one will be called Incremental Losses. If that's not too mordant.

Here are two new poems:

What you don’t know won’t hurt you

What you don’t know won’t hurt you

I said as I cleaned my dirty glass

Then you will see what will happen

Said the old woman, shaking her head.

I said as I cleaned my dirty glass

It’s time to get my vision checked.

Said the old woman, shaking her head,

It’s only been five years, after all.

It’s time to get my vision checked

Watch the blurry doctor shake his head

It’s only been five years, after all.

Plenty of time for an eye to go blind.

Watch the other doctor shake her head,

The woman-trouble doctor with bad news:

Plenty of time for a tumor to grow wild

Beyond its house and spread out to the yard.

The woman-trouble doctor with bad news:

It’s only been ten years since your last test:

Beyond its house it’s spread out to the yard.

Then you will see what will happen.

It’s only been ten years since your last test

Said the woman-trouble doctor, shaking her head.

Five years blur and ten years blood ignored.

What you don’t know won’t hurt you.

A Sudden Fear gripped me

Big black wore a roman collar

loud haranguing voice gripped my plackey heart

griped about my mistakes

groped in my head for control, contrition,

grouped its army of righteousness around me…

My clotted heart murmers an incantation:

Fear far fair fewer fever

sudden sodden

Would that a bucket of water would melt you…

Would that saying your secret name

Like Rumpelstiltskin

would force you to flee

from my memory

Where have I been?

I kept wondering why I was so tired... and then I began to get short of breath when climbing the hill from the parking lot at school to my office... and then I could not get warm... and then I was so itchy...
Finally I went to my doctor and she had some blood drawn. Turns out I have severe anemia from bleeding from radiation damage from the cancer treatment. My hemoglobin was 7 -- 13 is normal. Two days later I passed out in the hall at home and scared everybody, so I had an ambulance ride to the hospital... hemoglobin level down to 6.9. So they kept me overnight and gave me two pints of blood.
So the hemoglobin went up to 11, and I felt much better.
The doctor told me I had to take it really really easy, and eat spinach and red meat, and take iron pills... all of which I have been doing since these misadventures in December.
It was the most peaceful and quiet Christmas I ever had.

I'm better, but the hemo still isn't up to where it needs to be.
But school starts on Monday, and I will be happily back in the classroom, teaching Freshman Seminar, Mod Civ, and Women of Faith.

This tree is naked now

but less than a month ago, it was shimmering.

More on my reading life

I ask my first year students to write about their reading life in one of their first journal entries.
Their responses tell me about the lovers of reading, and those who hate to read - and who, consequently, are in for a hard time in college.

Of my own reading life... I have always loved to read. Right from the beginning. I wrote a poem about those first words in first grade:

Pick it up and read,

sang the child's voice beyond the wall.
The first word was SAID.
Three children -
a boy and two girls,
played with a dog and a cat.
White children with brown hair
whose plain names excited me
to hear in the air from my own mouth.

I had trouble telling
through from thought,
though from thorough.

My father picked me up at school.
We walked by the statue of Saint Agnes,
through the cement arch
from schoolyard to street.
I thought about knowing how to read SAID
though, by itself, it was lying alone in a corner,
but put it behind someone,
and it opens its mouth to a thorough coverage
of the news of the day.

I remember my delight at learning to read. I've been reading rather indiscriminately ever since.

When I got to college, I was sorry I had had such minimal guidance in choice of books, and consequently, such a dearth of classics under my belt. I have made up for lost time since then,in my years teaching literature.

In the past two years, I have discovered and come to love the book blogs and podcasts I can get on my iPod. One of my favorites is Books on the Nightstand.

My Reading Life

A number of my Facebook friends have been posting this list. I decided to examine my own reading life to see how many I have read.

The question:

"Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here (Does anyone REALLY believe this statement??). Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. "

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible ( over the years, in small pieces)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( maybe not all the histories)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell


22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis


37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert


53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens


82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas


98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Mom died

the night of October 6. She was 95, and was very debilitated, but she still knew me. I was glad that I was able to drive down to Baltimore and be with her. I had never been with anyone at their moment of death, and it was both intimate and mysterious.

She and I certainly had our ups and downs over the years, especially when I was in my teens and twenties, but in these last fifteen years, all of that was put away.

There was so much about her as a person that I never knew. She was orphaned in childhood, and would never talk about her first twenty years. Only when I was in my twenties did I learn that her father was raised Amish... and only in the last four years did I learn ( from my cousins)

that I have a small army of Amish second cousins. So many questions I wished I had asked her

when she still had her memory.

Labor Day Weekend

Warm and humid here in the country... Hurricane Earl is passing us by.

School is in full swing. This semester I am teaching 3: Freshman Seminar, Intro to Short Fiction,
and Christian Spirituality. I've taught them all before, but seem to need a good bit of time to improve them this time around. I am enjoying all three classes.

Am tearing myself away from reading/listening to a Maisie Dobbs mystery: Pardonable Lies.

Here are some photos of my garden in this late summertime.

My new book arrived on Wednesday!

I've been sending this manuscript around for about nine years, and it finally found a home with Wipf and Stock. The poems are more religious than the ones in the other books; that's probably why the manuscript kept getting rejected. Over the years I've kept revising it, and last Spring I changed the format , adding prayer reflection questions after each of my poems.

I love the cover! The publisher designed it, and nothing I would have come up with could equal it.

Here are some more details about it:

Description:

Designed for daily use as well as for retreats, DIGGING FOR GOD is an invitation to linger in the gardens of the Bible and the gardens of the heart. Using the passages concerning five biblical gardens, and then her own experiences distilled into poetry, Anne Higgins provides meditative ideas and questions as springboards to prayer. These poems will nudge memories. For all who are, as May Sarton said, "hopeful gardeners of the spirit," this volume offers fertile ground for prayer and reflection.

Website:
http://wipfandstock.com/

My book is available for order as of August 18, 2010at orders@wipfandstock.com

$15

It will be available on Amazon in 6-8 weeks.

Photos from California

From June 22-July 6, I enjoyed the wonderful, cool, dry weather of Northern California, living at our Provincial House in Los Altos Hills. These Photos come from there.

More Summer photos

The final segment of Summer

Today I went to the first faculty meeting of the new semester. This time next week, the first year students will be on campus.

It's been a lovely summer - some good trips and then some slow-moving and peaceful weeks.

I confess I've done more murder-mystery reading than anthing else. I'm feeling guilty about not producing any poems. Just couldn't break out of my inertia.

I do have a new book coming out, though. Perhaps when I get home today, it will have arrived in the mail.

Again, I'm going to try to post some photos from the summer.

Flowers before the drought and heat

These photos were taken in mid-June. After that, I was away for two weeks in California,
and during that time the East Coast suffered with record heat and no rain. So my garden doesn't look this good at present. Though we have had rain, the heat and humidity keep me indoors.

June garden photos and a poem or two

The narcissist in the garden

Every tulip an accolade
Every weed a reproach
Every rabbit a personal greeting
Every groundhog flinging brick bits and powder a deliberate attack
I dreamed the Hollyhocks
grew tall as trees,
proliferating on an inner wall of my house.

Bishops weed I was betrayed into planting
which now aggressively threatens
The pink feathers of the astilbe, mine – all mine!

Summer already

Sorry for the long delay between postings. Grading papers and other semester ending details kept me away. Also, I finished another round of "30/30" - a poem a day for 30 days - with some of my friends at Inside the Writer's Studio, and that kept me busy.

Now I have been out of school for almost a month, and have trouble accounting for the days. I've spent many of them gardening, writing, catching up on myriad doctors' appointments, sorting out my messy room, etc. Recently I spent five days in West Chester PA, attending the West Chester University Poetry Conference... my seventh time attending this much loved gathering.

Happy Easter!

here's my favorite Easter poem - by ee cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)