In a February Mood

There comes a point, after weeks of ungodly dark and dreary days, unbroken by any hint of sun or warmth, when one's own company wears thin.

It takes a lot to break me down, probably because I now have something concrete against which to measure any sadness, especially the slight, niggling sadness brought by dismal weather. So what. It's gray for months on end. My friend Hank said that bad weather looks worse when you're looking out the window. Get out in it. It takes a surprising amount of fortitude to go out, looking for adventure, when the light is as flat and dull as a mall parking lot.

But we do go out. We have to put some miles on the dog, and on me. I decided to follow my nose and pick a road I'd never been down (or, in this case, up). 

It's not hard to find those around here. 

To get there, we walked past this old jewel, moldering in an overgrown field. I've paid several visits to this house, but they've been in summer. I like to poke around abandoned places to see what denizens of their gardens have survived the neglect.

You can't kill a ditch lily, even if you try. Ah, this was a beautiful day at the old place, a not-February day. I had fun snooping around the foundation and outbuildings. Just the reflection of a blue sky in the window cheers me.

But now we are here in February, in the weeks before the woodcocks get back, and this is what we get: gray and brown and wet and not much else. Living here, I realized as I gazed at it this evening, would have been problematic even when the place was tended. Whipple Run lies between the house and the road, so you have to ford it to get out, and ford it again to get home. Not a big deal now, but let it rain torrents for a few days, and you've got a situation on your hands. 

Water will do what it will. It seeks the lowest point. Thus, what was once a driveway is now a streambed. We have a way of inviting water down our paths. We grade them until they're lower than the surrounding land, and water will always oblige us,  running in to take the low road. 

My boots were not up to the fording, so we walked on. 

Mood:

Ah, February, you old, cold, wet blanket. Are you trying to outdo your nasty sister January? 

I wonder what's up this road? 

First there was a pool with a nice sandbar, a little oxbow backwater. I scanned the muddy trunk of the drowning tree and found what I was looking for: mustelid tracks.

Hoping for otter, I settled for mink. Mink will do.

A light rain pattered on the surface of the water. We pressed on anyway.

Turns out there wasn't much up this road but woods, which was fine with us.

When I got to the top of the hill some messages came in on my phone. 

 Phoebe had rented a little smart car on La Gomera for the weekend and done some exploring. While I trudged down a muddy road in Appalachia, gazing at a house bound only for rot and ruin, she had made a pilgrimage to find a wee chapel she'd once spotted from far below. 

She was not disappointed. There it stood, sharp as an amethyst in the clear Atlantic sunshine.

And the climb up there had looked like this. Oh, what I'd have given to take that hike with her!

And she and Oscar had ended the day like this:

Oh, to be young and in love. 

I'll take middle-aged and still alive, with everything more or less still functional, because it's what I've got.

What is it that keeps us in place? Why do I choose to live in a place that weeps all winter long? Why does my daughter choose to live in the sunstruck glow of a rocky island, the sea all around her? That second question needs no answer.

Why does it not occur to me to leave, to strike out for someplace new?

I search for answers, and find I don't want to leave here. I'm scratching and clawing away at my house, throwing out what I don't need (nearly everything); trying to get it back in repair, so I can stop worrying about the rot and malfunction of it all, and enjoy it instead. It's a goal. The old furnace seems to need about a grand a year just to keep running; I've replaced everything you could replace on that damn thing.  I'm having new siding put on the tower, rooting out the wall rot on the north side (and wherever else it comes up.) Braced for the worst.

 I love working in my studio, starting new projects, watching for my old jay friends, and dreaming of seedlings coming up in only a couple more months. And then it will be garden time, and there's no place I'd rather be in garden time. And just as it's garden time, I'll take off on a book tour (see left sidebar of this blog). So there are things to look forward to, and boy do I look forward to them.

I'm choosing to vary my life with travel, to give myself enough outings to counter the sameness of remaining in place. I feel the press of time, the impermanence of my stay on this earth.  I have become one of those women who travel more, because they suddenly can. But I also travel more because I need to. I get so much more out of it than ever before. 

I'm trying to be kinder to myself, knowing that I'm still grieving. Something like this doesn't go away in a year. It becomes part of you, and it colors your outlook, not necessarily in a bad way all the time. It makes you grateful to be here. It makes you so happy to feel joy again, when it happens. It makes you expect less of life, having seen how easily it can be grabbed away. So when something good happens, you're just bowled over that it was so good. And when bad things happen, you measure them against the mother of all bad things, and they don't look that bad to you. Still, you're always looking over your shoulder, and I don't expect that to change. You have to keep an eye on something that big.

As the anniversaries, big and small, portentious and life-changing and merely depressing, parade by in my psyche, I find myself walking over to gaze at the house where Bill lived for a short time, where he grilled and laughed and played music, then suffered and died, finally leaving the suffering, and us, behind.

 I don't know what I expect to find by going over there. There's nothing I'll get from it but little  shards of memories, the sharp ones that dig in. There's no one to tell me I should stay away, so when I'm drawn there, I go. The place seems so much smaller, so diminished, without him in it. And he's not there. I sense nothing of him there. 

But I keep going. I guess I'm looking for a connection, the same one I'm looking for when I walk to his grave each morning. What doesn't seem right to me is that there should be nothing of him left here. The kids struggle with that, too, that feeling of being left alone. He had such a big soul, such a huge appetite for life, that it seems there should be a trace of that still around. Seems like he should be tossing the treetops on a still, wet day.

 Nothing moves, and not a bird sings. 

On a Late Winter Day

 Shila and I had been planning to get out for a hike one mid- February afternoon, but it was so gray and dreary that we slogged away at cleaning our respective houses instead.  Hours after we'd decided to scratch the hike, I saw a broken sky coming and called her. "We've got a broken sky. Not much light left. Let's just get out and drive around and look at clouds, cover maximum territory."

She was up for that! She raced up from town and we piled into my Subaru with Chetty. We sought out several dirt roads that I'd been driving by for a couple of decades and had always wondered about. I wanted to find out how they all connected. 

The first one we took led to a fabulous dairy farm. I have since learned from helpful Facebook friends that the white bags that I had surmised might contain spare rainclouds, saved for a dry summer day, actually have silage or haylage inside, fermenting away for the cattle to eat. I prefer to think of them as cloud storage, so I will.

 Instead of fretting that they were spoiling my photos, I decided to love the giant white plastic bags. They sure looked cool in this panorama. Please click on it to embiggen.

Shila and Chet and I lingered as long as we could in a small German churchyard, where the stones were all auf Deutsch. 

The clouds stuck together, the wind turned sharp and the temperature plummeted. We had barely worn enough clothes. I love these hands and the fonts on this stone. Also, this is a classic Chet Baker photobomb. Does he see dead people? 

 The font and the image on this monument get me.  GATES AJAR GONE HOME. They remind me of my new friend Bobby Rosenstock's amazing work at Just A Jar Design Press here in Marietta.

We fled from the biting wind and gloomy skies of the German cemetery, turning onto a very strange road, knowing not where we'd end up. As I drove, the terrain began to look familiar. "I think I know where I am!" I said.  Sugar Run...the name was so familiar, I'd seen it before, so I knew it would come out on a road I drive. Sure enough, we came out at a bizarre backwater of trailers, shanties and outbuildings where, as far as I can tell, large numbers of junked cars are generated to be spread for miles through the surrounding countryside. Geesh! We broke out onto some familiar rolling hills and the sun did, too. We had trees to visit in the last light of day. 

I have long since fallen in love with this row of white ashes, only to find them losing their bark this winter. Emerald ash borers are devastating our forest. Hey why not? Everybody else is. So, knowing these ashes are doomed, I take their portraits at every turn, because they will probably be gone a year from now. I call them the Samba Dancers. I particularly love the one who leans way out over the road, shaking her thing. All good things must pass, I'm told.

Just up the hill from them is my wee sassafras, the one who reaches and reaches without finding anything to stop her questing twig-fingers.

That crazy branch starting at the middle of the right side of the trunk and meandering its way into the sky makes me smile every time I see it. The other branches lean away from it as if they know it's crazy, and maybe a bit dangerous. It seems not to care that it could soon spoil the proportions and outlines of its mother tree. That branch is going for it.

The sun peeked out from behind its cloud-curtain and slammed golden light into the scene, throwing some branches into relief. I realized, looking at them from another angle, that the two branches on the lower right were going a bit wacky, too. That whole tree has got it going on. That sassafras is feeling itself.

Stepping closer, I looked over the hill and found a new scene beyond the little tree. 

I'm going to walk back there someday, see where it goes. 

How lucky can you get, to be able to seek out such landscapes whenever you please?

Just down the road is my Cold Mountain sassafras.  The scene looks like something from Antietam to me. A place where the rifle balls flew so thick and fast that what few trees remained standing had their branches blown off. It's timeless.

I love it in every light. Big clouds coming up behind, well, that's fine, too. 

Shila and I shot cloudscapes all the way home. There's another Civil War scene on our road, but this time the big oak belongs to us. That's a good feeling, to know that nobody's going to cut that tree but you, and you're never, ever going to lay a blade on it. This oak has some interesting branching, too, some lower limbs that are a bit out of proportion to the rest. I think that's what makes it beautiful.

Back home by the mailbox, the best was yet to come. Creamy sunset clouds and more white plastic. Plastic never looked so good, as Hodge has observed.

The light was bouncing from the clouds to the puddle to the plastic and back, and the hayrolls were floating somewhere in the middle of it all.

Another successful photo-expotition had come to its conclusion, by far the best three hours of that February Sunday.