Fall

The distance from the top
Of the ladder
To the flat rock
In the path
Is proportional
To the pain.

I imagine the arc
Made by the top
Of my head
And the ground,
As in those too brief seconds
I flew earthwards.

There was no thinking:
It just happened,
And was over.

Lying there
On my back
In pain
Grateful
I could move my limbs,
I went over each inch
Of my body, asking,
"Are you okay?"

My head complained,
But missed the rock
By an inch or two.

I could crawl.
Later I could stand, walk,
But not without constant pain.

Pain, the not-so-gentle messenger
That we are earth-bound, gravity-lovers,
That no matter how much our spirits soar,
We cannot fly.

Ellen B. Rust
4/5/11

Bloom when you're ready

Nevermind the blast of cold from February wind and snows. This Black-eyed Susan decided to bloom because, well, she wanted to. This photo was taken on February 22. What a brave, courageous flower!

Poachers in the neighborhood

I really don't want to write about this. It makes me angry. It's not the first time, though.

When R. went out to walk Baskin Saturday morning, about 6:45, he noticed blood in the snow in the far SW corner of our 7 acres. He followed the trail of blood to the edge of our pine trees, where he found this young buck. Judging from his size and 4 antler points, we think he was less than two years old. Probably one of the crew born in our relatively safe yard. We've had fawns in our yard every summer for the last 20 years, maybe longer. We have a lot of shrubs and trees, good places for the does to hide their babies during the day. When he was a puppy, we trained our now 14-year-old Standard Poodle not to chase the deer, so they know this is a good place to hang out. Obviously, we can't protect them from everything.

About 18 years ago, we found a large buck (10-12 points) dead not far from this spot, and evidence that someone had driven into our front yard, looking for him. Both times, someone was hunting at night, which is illegal.

We live in a subdivision, for Pete's sake. There are lots of legal places to hunt. Don't hunt in my yard. Don't hunt at night, when you can't see what you else you might be shooting. And don't hunt out of season. Deer season was over weeks ago.

But this wasn't the only victim. Later in the day we found evidence that another deer had been shot about 100 feet from the house, then dragged through the yard on the NW end of our property. The poacher broke the bottom rail on our fence and pulled out the barbed wire in order to drag the deer through and load it onto his vehicle. We figure he left the young buck on the other side of the house because he didn't see where it fell.

We've dealt with dead or dying deer before--mostly victims of vehicles--so we knew what to do. This was our 5th or 6th call. The county's Solid Waste department has a truck with a huge crane which picks the animals up and drops them into a large bin in back. But you have to drag the deer to the road, because they won't drive the heavy truck through your yard. (Nor would we want them to.) We learned with that first buck to roll the animal onto a tarp, then drag the tarp through the yard. Snow on the ground makes it easier. It's still a workout, though. Especially for two 60-somethings.

More photos are in an album here. The sheriff's deputy wanted to see them. He was nice, but they can't do much. Poachers move on. I'm glad no neighborhood children or pets were hurt by these people. But I'm still angry.

Snowy Day

Snowy house

I love how quiet the world grows after a snowfall.

Waiting

Haiku written while walking the dog this afternoon:

Calm before the storm--
Dry leaves crunch, robins chatter
Waiting for the snow.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Fear of Trying

When I looked up from writing my morning pages today, I noticed Audrey, the neighbors' tortoise-shell cat, sitting on top of their tennis court fence, surveying the world. From where I sat in our house, which is downhill from theirs, she appeared to be at the same height as the eaves of the second-floor end of their house. It wasn't until I walked outside to take a picture that I saw she wasn't as high as it seemed from our windows. Still, the fence is 10-12 feet tall, and although there are vines growing all over it, it's a dangerous place for anything without wings. It scared me to see her perched so precariously.

I couldn't help but wonder why she chose to climb that tall fence, and what she saw from there. Perhaps it was her Mt. Everest. Maybe now that she has climbed to that height, she'll lose interest in repeating the experience. Is she the type of adventurer, like Reinhold Messner, who moves from challenge to challenge, or will she repeat her performance over and over, just because she can? No, she was probably just curious as to whether or not she could study her prey--the birds who frequent our feeders--better from there.

Audrey's bold climb, and her obvious satisfaction in the accomplishment, made me wonder how many times I've wanted to do something but stopped because of fear. Fear of falling, fear of failing, injury, ridicule. I"m guilty of favoring safety over risk. But what have I missed by refusing the dangerous climb? What great expanse have I not seen?

i carry your heart with me

Mary Coffey Overholser, 1947-1970

40 years is a long time to remember. A long time to save letters from someone. There are some people, though, you never forget. Mary Overholser was one of my dearest friends from the time I met her in 1963 until she died seven years later, in a car accident. I suspect that everyone who knew her felt the same. She was a friend's friend--loyal, compassionate, kind. She was also intelligent, inquisitive, full of life, down-to-earth, and other-worldly. Beautiful inside and out. I can still hear her laugh, after all these years.

In a letter to her mother two months she died, I wrote that my friendship with Mary had not been severed by her death, merely transformed: "Mary always made my mind feel W-I-D-E and now it feels even wider. I frankly cannot help believing that anything is possible."

To another friend I wrote, "I am still formulating my thoughts on her absence, death, disappearance - it's almost like she went off somewhere and forgot to tell us she was going. But I can't fool myself - she's dead. -- But you know how her mind worked - for instance, if I say The fact is: Mary is dead, I consider that awhile; then I can see that twinkle in her eyes and hear that laugh that meant she was seeing one step ahead and was waiting for me to catch up. And I wonder: as always, Mary knows something I don't know and she's having a damned good time about it."

When someone dies young, they never grow old, so Mary will always be on the cusp of life. She still pops into my mind occasionally, especially around the time of the Winter Solstice, which is when the van she was riding in slid on the ice and flipped. Coming home for the holidays, from film-making school in the northeast. She was the only one not wearing a seat belt; not because of carelessness, but because there weren't enough to go around, and someone needed to volunteer. Mary was like that.

I once saw her eyes in the eyes of a young autistic artist, and thought, "Mary reincarnated?" I laughed at the idea--God asking for a volunteer to come back as an autistic child; Mary not hesitating for a second, but raising a wing and shouting, "Me, me! That sounds so exciting!" Which, it if were true, would explain the child's extraordinary artistic ability.

Mary visited me again today when I read e. e. cummings' poem on Patti Digh's blog, 37 Days. Mary loved cummings, and quoted him frequently. Her poetry reflected his influence. My life reflects her influence.

I will always carry her heart in mine.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

e. e. cummings

Silly, silly, silly

What's the silliest thing you've ever done? (That you can admit to in public.)

Wait a minute. What's the difference between silly and stupid? I can remember lots of stupid things I've done in the past. Okay, recently, too. But silly? Silly = innocent fun, in my book. Something that makes me--and those around me--laugh, but causes no harm. Maybe I quit being silly when I became an adult. That's too bad, because I remember a lot of laughter when I was a kid.

My sister and I were silly frequently. Mother referred to us as "the silly sisters." Or maybe we gave ourselves that title. We were laughing tonight about singing songs from the album, "The Singing Nun" while we did the dishes after supper. We also played hide and seek with our cats. (The cats usually won.)

One of the silliest things I used to do was sing the purposefully off-key song about the baby prune. That worked well for me since I usually sang off-key anyway. Here are the lyrics as I remember them:

A baby prune is like his dad
'Cept he ain't wrinkled half so bad.
We have wrinkles on our faces--
Prunie has them every places.
No matter how young a prune may be,
He's always getting stewed.
Little seed inside of pru-in,
Is it night, or is it noo-in?
What 'ca doin', pru-in, stewin'?
Hmmm?

Haha. I sang that silly song so much, my friends called me Prunie. Now, that's silly!