Gorgeous weather outside this morning, but so far it’s been a bookish Saturday. I ended the workweek at 11:50 p.m. with a dip into the Chicago poetry anthology Wherever I’m At, and I opened the weekend with my face burrowed back into Roger Angell’s This Old Man, which in the space of only a few minutes took me on a ride of reminiscences (Angell’s) that left me with multiple new additions to both my want-to-read book list and my want-to-see movie list.
Happy sigh, when my reading adds to, rather than subtracts from, my ever-growing book list. Also, when I need to add two random scraps of paper (today that would be a flimsy receipt torn into pieces) to the one bookmark actually needed to mark my place because, of course, there are passages in the book that I want to be able to go back and find easily when needed.
Let’s put “needed” in quotes, but honestly the soul does need these moments.
It’s not all happy news today, though. Our bookstore is closing. We’ve known this for weeks, probably more than a month, but I continue to face it with a mixture of sadness and denial. It doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps I’m at an age now where more and more of my good friends will quietly die off, but to start with my bookstore seems a cruelty. This shop has nurtured so many memories, supplied so many gifts to friends and family, provided so many hours of discovery, I can’t imagine life without it. The only good news is that it hasn’t failed to thrive; the owners have simply worn themselves out with its running. They don’t want to sell to someone else because they don’t trust anyone else with its name and its customer list. I respect that. And yet…
So later today, I’ll probably find myself once again cruising its shelves to see if anything calls my name and demands to come home with me. Bittersweet, as it feels more than a little like picking at the bones.
The hawks are well and truly gone. Yesterday, believing they had left the nest the day before, I walked past to check (of course) and found that I could see much less of the nest than I had previously. One adult bird was up there, facing away from me and doing … something. There was its head moving, its tail bobbing a bit. But there didn’t seem to be any young birds. I heard one hawk call from a tree somewhere nearby, but that was it.
Today, another check. High, high in the sky a raptor soared above me. In the nesting tree, no birds. In fact, no nest.
No nest. It’s gone. Our nest of two years, that I watched a pair build last year, is no more. I don’t know if the young birds damaged it while trying to fly, if a storm hit it, or if the birds actively dismantled it because they were done.
I must read more about Cooper’s hawks. I want to be an informed neighbor, a good neighbor. And of course I hope they come back next year. I’m pretty confident they’re still in the neighborhood, but where? I must read more about Cooper’s hawks.
Flowers, not hawks
On the bright side, my milkweed and day lilies are in full bloom, together, a lovely combination. The hydrangeas, too, are thriving. And the bee balm and sweet peas that I put in last year have taken root—finally. I have tried both before with no success.
Yesterday I spied the bright red of a milkweed bug flying through the flowers some distance away from me. Its color gave it away; it was too small to identify otherwise at that distance. What a delightful surprise it was. I usually see them happily settled on the plants, sometimes massed together, rarely a single one in flight.
Ah, summer in the garden. If only the vegetables would thrive so well. This year’s lot seems somewhat sad: only one tomato plant with any flowers (and a meager couple they are); the basil scraggly but trying to recover from nibbling by bugs—probably our cicada emergence—at the start of the summer; no blossoms yet on the beans. Even the dill seed decided not to germinate (or perhaps got eaten?), so I had to put in a couple of plants later on. I’ll hold out hope, though, for a recovery.
I’ve been watching the nest—a Cooper’s hawk nest three blocks away—closely for the better part of at least two weeks, hoping not to miss the fledging. In my wildest dreams, I would be right there when one or more of the babes flew for the first time. Realistically, I think my main hope was to monitor the situation and know—or nearly know, as much as possible without actually seeing—when it had happened.
I missed it last year. After weeks of watching the nest, from its construction, to Mama Hawk sitting it by herself first for weeks, even before having eggs to warm (they really do this!), clear through to little heads peering occasionally above its rim, I was on vacation when the fledglings flew. It was a needed and happy vacation—almost certainly Hound Dog’s last one, and he enjoyed it—but I was sad to come home and find the nest emptied, defunct. Sadder than ever I would have imagined.
So with Hound Dog unable to travel anymore, and his people no longer willing to leave him in anyone else’s care, I’ve pinned a lot of hope on being around for this year’s fledging. The hawks are back at the same nest for a second straight year. (I say “the hawks,” but I’ve no idea whether it’s the same birds, young who were raised in the nest last year, or an entirely different pair that happened upon it and found it. What I do know is that it has been occupied with Cooper’s hawks yet again, more joy for me.) And I’ve been watching it closely, walking past multiple times each day, once even making The Husband stop the car so I could get out and check the view on the way to some outing or other.
This past week or two has seen a lot of activity. The adults have been perched just outside the nest most of the time, sometimes seeming to feed the babes but often just perched, as if there weren’t actually enough room inside for them anymore. Two to three days ago, I saw a pair of youngsters perched on nest’s edge, flapping a bit, probably testing out those wings, while one of the adults called out from a nearby tree, perhaps encouraging them to soar.
I haven’t actually seen any of the young (and how many are there, even?) fly from the nest. But this morning when I went past, I saw no birds at all for the first morning in more than a week. I did hear one hawk call from nearby, but the nest looked empty. Had they flown? It seemed likely. From my vantage point down below, of course, there’s no way to be sure, but…
This afternoon, as I stood chatting with my neighbor outside our two houses, a young hawk flew overhead. One of the babes from my nest three blocks away? I think so. It’s the first time all summer that I’ve seen a hawk on my block, and it was a small one. I’ll keep watching that nest, but I think our little family might have lifted off.
Though I’m uncertain about the hawks, there’s no question that a hummingbird just made its daily pass among the branches of the large tree on my tree lawn. I never knew before that they would feed in trees, but this one does a fly-through every day, hovering branch to branch in apparent search for food. My lilacs also attract hummingbirds when in bloom, and the trumpet vine in the back yard is in full glory right now, so we have plenty of nectar for those long beaks.
The plants feed the hummingbirds. The hummingbirds feed my soul.
Today is also the day that I finished Tracy K. Smith’s memoir To Free the Captives. More than memoir (not that memoir isn’t enough!), it’s an exploration of racism and Black history and shared history, and a (perhaps) prayer for progress and equity and healing. It reads often like poetry, almost one long prose poem, as much as the series of essays that it is. It’s moving, thought-provoking, challenging, and I expect I’ll be thinking about it for quite some time.
This has been memoir month for me, as the book I read immediately before this one was Knife, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of the 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him. I’m still thinking about this one, too, as well as about expanding my list-of-books-I’ve read-by-Salman-Rushdie. It’s been a long time since I read his fiction, the last time being my second pass through Midnight’s Children, courtesy of my book club, and I miss it. I’m reminded of seeing him speak about his writing and free speech as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival—hardly seems possible that was nine years ago, but apparently it was.
I opened Facebook this morning to track down a link shared by Escape Into Life for a daily literary meditation exercise for January. I’d been meaning to start this on January 1, so I’m already four days behind, and to be honest that seems at least par if not better than par for these stay-at-home, end-of/start-of-year times. Don’t judge me. I’ve been filled with ennui here at the start of 2021.
Facebook greeted me, as it usually does first thing in the morning, with a memory. I looked; the algorithm-driven memories are probably my favorite facet of Facebook. Today’s was a photo of an apple—a ripe, red apple pendant on a tree—that for the life of me I couldn’t remember taking. Possibly I didn’t, because it was connected to a poem fragment I had quoted with a link:
“Medieval physicists thought gravity was love. They catalogued it attraction.”
I clicked the link to re-read the same poem, but got a different one. It turns out the one I shared last year had (probably) been the featured poem of the day on Autumn Sky Poetry. And the poem of the day for today was another one—also utterly lovely: Why I Have to Sing, by Kitty Jospé.
I read it and then found the one by John Calvin Hughes as well. What a lovely start to the day.
To top it off, I did follow that up by starting on the literary calendar for January, which fed my soul. Now feeling hopeful, I head off to start my day—first by mailing a poem/card to a pen pal (what a lovely, old-fashioned phrase) before turning my attention to the work that pays my bills.
I have so many things I want to write about today! Reading, the end of this seemingly endless year, the deer that visited our front yard overnight while we slept…
Let’s start there, with the deer.
I took this photo thinking it would be a Wordless Wednesday post here on the blog. Then I got up this morning and wrote it into my #frontstooppoetry for the day. So, words, which means not wordless.
My husband and I saw this in the snow when we opened the gate from our side yard to head out to the sidewalk for our first walk of the day yesterday.
A single deer had walked right into the branches of our front-yard lilac tree, and from there we couldn’t tell where it had gone. Right on through? Maybe, but the tracks on the other side were definitely a rabbit’s. Either a rabbit obscured deer tracks, or the deer backed out the way it came. We could see only about three hoof prints, so it’s possible this deer used the sidewalk and veered into our yard only for a quick snack. I’ve seen it happen in the daylight. I know lots of people consider deer pests; to me, they’re graceful and beautiful creatures, with whom I’m generally happy to share a garden. It brightened my day to know I had hosted one in the wee hours.
Reading out the year
Lots of my friends are tallying up the books they’ve read this year and sharing the numbers on social media. Not me. I’ve found reading difficult this year. Oftentimes I’ve found myself too anxious to focus on reading anything longer than a poem, and for a short while leading up to and following Election Day, I couldn’t even read poetry. As a friend said to me recently, my relationship with books has been a troubled one. On the bright side, I’ve actually read more poetry books than usual this year. Among the ones I finished the year with was The Abridged History of Rainfall,by Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s Press), which is absolutely super. One poem in it, Elegy for the Living, is so heartbreakingly beautiful that I was compelled to read it aloud for the Twitterverse:
My unread book pile grew the other day when a friend emailed to ask if he had loaned me a book that he couldn’t find. He had not, but I’m pretty sure I own the book, and I thought, “If I can find it and have already read it, I can just pass it along to him”—an elegant solution to get him the book he wanted and clear one object out of my too-cluttered life, don’t you think?
You can probably tell already that this didn’t work out as planned.
I, too, found that I couldn’t track down this book, which for all I know might have decided to take a forbidden vacation with its sibling of the same name from my friend’s book collection.
But in the process of looking for it, I came across three other books that I had forgotten I had and really do want to read: two murder mysteries and Joe Biden’s book about the death of his son Beau, Promise Me, Dad. So those vaulted directly to the top of my next-read pile. The good news is that I’ve just finished reading one of them. Care to guess which one?
As we’re counting down the days to Inauguration Day 2021, and I’m looking forward to change in the White House—and, I hope, the country—it seemed appropriate to end 2020 with Biden’s memoir. I took the rediscovery of this book as a sign that the time was right to get to know my next president a little better. I’m glad I did. Although, of course, I cried at the end. So be forewarned.
Next up is one of the murder mysteries, a little lightness to start the new year.
My husband’s political advent calendar
Speaking of lightness, the new year, and the countdown to Inauguration Day…over on Escape into Life my husband, renowned cartoonist Phil Maish, has created a post-Christmas advent calendar to count down the last days of the current White House administration. Each day he opens a new door to show a new cartoon. Day 25 will be Inauguration Day.
After the overnight snowstorm that revealed the deer tracks yesterday morning, we had an utterly gorgeous day today, sunny and clear and crisp. The husband and I took a nice walk, to and through a neighborhood park, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos, including the one at the top of this post. It was a simply perfect winter day; I couldn’t have asked for a better one to end 2020. We’ll be spending our New Year’s Eve the way we like best: watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and trying to stay awake until midnight. Tomorrow’s lentil soup is already made, and the traditional Swedish rice pudding will follow it up; if I recall correctly, we started 2020 without either of those good-luck staples, and look where that got us.
