Arctic Poppies

November Light

Armistice Day

The neighborhood was quiet when I stepped outside Sunday night.  I could hear traffic in the distance, but, after weeks, the constant hum of the harvest had stopped: the combines were in from the fields and the blowers were resting from drying the corn.

We ourselves spent the weekend finishing our winter preparations: organizing the barn, moving hay, filling the bird feeders, sweeping the patio and porches, running the lawnmower out of gas, draining and putting away the hoses, putting up driveway markers and the snow gauge, digging and storing tuberous begonias and dahlias for next year.  I harvested the last of the carrots; we observed that anyone who had time to style a carrot for a photo shoot couldn’t seriously complain of any real problems in life.

We had time even though the news told us the storm was coming.  The farmers had time to finish the harvest.  The weeks before, the harvest had been running behind schedule.  Farming is always done in the tension between time and weather: will the corn mature before the first hard frost?  How long can the corn dry in the field before the first snow?  (Afterwards, it can be harvested, but with losses.)  Once this storm was first forecast, midweek beforehand, the farmers were in the fields twenty-four hours a day, finishing the harvest.

Monday morning, the snow was less dire than predicted – the storm shifted 50 miles north of the projected path – but these early “gales of November” can be brutal.  This storm came on November 10, the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  November 11 is the anniversary of the 1940 Armistice Day Blizzard, when the temperature dropped 50 degrees in a few hours and 145 people died.

We grumble about the lack of precision in the weather forecast, and about the abrupt end to our autumn.  It’s easy to lose sight of how much weather forecasting has improved, especially within our lifetimes, and how that saves lives and trouble.  Weather satellites and elaborate computer models let us see, generally, what’s coming, days in advance, and prepare – the gift of time.

Promenade

Milkweed

Bodhisattva

Fourteen Views of the River

Measured Depths

Crossroads

Fare Forward

Up to Here

Company

Night Creatures

Polar Vortex

A Rainy Weekend is the Home of Invention, and other elements of the "Invention" genealogy

Ignoring the Oracle

When I sought the bones
years later, they had melded
back into the earth.

We have a small pasture; at the time we had a horse, a pony, and a donkey.  In the morning, I would walk out into the pasture and bring the equines back to the barn to feed them some grain.  I had done this early one morning and was carrying a bale of hay back to the hay rack in the middle of the pasture when I realized the rack had a skeletal leg neatly arranged in it.

My first thought -- well, really, all thoughts left me.  When I did have a thought, it was -- in the way that something utterly unexpected makes one utterly illogical -- "Hunh.  I didn't notice any of the animals missing a leg when they walked into the barn."  It took me a minute to register why I would have noticed that sooner, and also that the bones before me had the hoof of a cow and not a horse.

My next thought was that this was an elaborate practical joke.  As I cogitated, I realized it would have been extremely difficult for people to climb over the fence, in the dark, carrying the complete bones of a cow leg, and then reassemble them with anatomical precision in the hay rack.

What must have happened is this: some years past, a cow died in a field, where it decomposed.  After the grass grew up around the it, the farmer cut the grass for hay, not noticing the skeleton from the height of his tractor.  The baler packed the hay into a bale at a perfect angle to incorporate the bones into the center of the bale, where they couldn't be seen.  I bought the hay, stacked it into the barn, and months later put it out for the equines.  They ate away all the grass, leaving the bones for me to find.

I calmed down as I thought this through, but I wasn't thinking about bone folders, or whatever oracles the bones might tell.  I was upset by the intrusion and threw the bones away over the fence, down the slope into the woods.

Book Spine Poetry: Prairie Heart

Prairie earth, blue sky dream --
the prairie traveler in the new world,
a natural state, where the buffalo roam,
rising from the plains, the Great Plains.
The diversity of life: the birds, grasses,
trees and shrubs, the land that feeds us.
Bring back the buffalo!  In wildness
is the preservation of the world.

Book Spine Poetry: Suspect Terrain

A taste for travel,
     undaunted courage,
          a beautiful mind.
How to lie with maps?
     The other path, where on earth?
          In suspect terrain:
               complexity, chaos, the places that scare you.
I've been gone far too long;
     I should have stayed home...
          coming home crazy.

Book Spine Poetry: Hard Rain

Does the weather really matter?
The Great Deluge: rising tide --
high water at Catfish Bend,
lanterns on the levee:
goodbye to a river.

Book Spine Poetry: Femme Fatale

The Duke of Deception, the Knight, the Lady, and the Priest:
parallel lives, the archetype of pilgrimage -- a Byzantine journey.
Women, fire, and dangerous things -- the Silk Roads, secrets
of the flesh...
the unknown shore, the far side of the world.